How can I add a custom time field such as "1d", or other thoughts on how to handle a QA tester approving issues

[David Parks]

We are using greenhopper. We want to add a 4th column to the taskboard that is for QA. So sprint tasks go through Todo->In Progress->QA verify->Done

But we need a way to track who the QA person on the issue is. I created a custom user picker field to store the QA testers name, but I also want to track QA time or at least estimated QA time for each issue. So the way I envision it is that each issue has both an original estimate as well as another field for QA effort estimate. This way we can get a report about how much time we're putting into QA vs. development, and also see how each person is doing over time (we like to have reports on when new employees are performing the same as others, for example, and we use hour-estimate trends for this).

But I don't see a custom field that supports the standard time formats of 1h, or 1d for example. Is there a way to do this? Did I miss something?

Is there a better way that I should consider in how to implement a new QA swimlane?

[George Carvill]

Agree with Verhasi: We created a new subtask called "QA Task" and every story gets one.

[Verhás István]

Using the built in work time tracking features of Jira i propose to create a subtask or other issue linked with the development one for QA. In this way you can generate the reports you mentioned.

If it is not enough consider using a third party time tarcking plugin such as Tempo and many others. They allow you to categorize the work time even within the same issue and you can create reports per categories.