Assign verification person on Jira Board

Question

I've googled a lot about that but couldn't find appropriate solution so far.

We have almost default Jira Agile board with last columns: In Progress, Verify, Closed. Workflow is:

• Developer move task to verify after he finish implementation
• QA (or other developer) verify task and move it to closed.

The problem is we cannot easily track if story was picked up for verification by anyone. Jira board shows only developer as assigned person and that doesn't change after moving to verify column (imho should not be changed).

The ideal solution for me is to have second assignment column with next logic:

• App columns except Verify shows icon of assign1 (that is usually developer) for its tasks
• Verify column shows icon of assign2 (that is usually QA or another developer) for its tasks.

Does anyone know any elegant way how to achieve that or somewhat at least similar with Jira Agile board?

Answer 1

A couple of possible options:

a] Add a status of 'Ready for test'. When transitioned to this status the issue would be made unassigned by a post function. Issues in this status would represent work awaiting verification, but not yet assigned. When a QA picks up the issue they would transition it to 'Verify' which would automatically assign it to them using a post function.

b] Create a 'Lead QA' role and use a post function to make it the assignee for any issues transitioned in to Verifty. The Lead QA can then either work on the issue or make sure it gets picked up by somebody in the QA role.

The second approach is less in the spirit of Scrum, but I have seen it used successfully before.

Answer 2

I eventually added a custom field Verifying By that is of type "User Picker". I also added an additional column called Verifying that contains tasks that are done and picked by someone for verification. So this column was placed between "Done" and "Closed".

I also added two post-functions:

1. Done -> Verifying By - sets Verifying By to the value of the current user (one who is making the transition)
2. Verifying By -> Done | Blocked - clears Verifying By field.

The final step was to show this Verifying By field for issues on the Board - that was made in Board settings.

These all together solve the initial goals:

• to check if the task is picked for verification
• who picked the task for verification

Answer 3

Create a separate sub-task in the story for QA verification

You said that you do not want the assigned person to be changed when the story is moved to Verify.

In that case, you have only one other option. You can create a separate sub-task in the story for QA verification and assign that to the QA (or other devloper). As soon as the developer task is moved to Verify, the person assigned to verify it can move their task to In Progress.

If that doesn't work for you, you can look at a few other options suggested by Jira here:

JIRA is designed so that issues must be assigned to a single individual to prevent tasks from being overlooked...However, if you want to configure JIRA to allow issues to be assigned to multiple users there are a few option for doing so...