How to deal with QA time in Jira?

[Ivar]

We need to log the time of every team member in Jira. Today we do this by adding a QA type sub-tasks to every story, and log the time they spent on testing the issue here.

It has worked pretty good until now.

As we are in the process of moving to the new rapid boards, this becomes a challenge. Until now we have estimated sub-tasks using story points, not hours. In order to get the rapid boards to work optimal I understand that this is the way forward:

- Estimate user stories in story points

- Estimate sub-tasks in hours

However, what do we do with the QA tasks? They usually do not estimate their effort on the different user stories, so all the time they spend will lead to the fact that the majority of the estimates will "miss" as additional unestimated QA hours are added to the totals. The way I understand it, this will destroy everything.

Are there any suggestions to how we can continue to track QA time, without necessarily having to estimate the QA effort as well during sprint planning?

[Ivar · Accepted solution]

So we baisically ended up with this strategy:

- Team lead/Component lead estimate the issue when created in Jira. This includes expected QA effort

- During sprint planning, sub-tasks of QA time is added to the issue. One for "Create test case" and one for the actual test.

Then the QA sub-tasks are completed as ordinary work.