Ownership of Stories

[Stuart Hemming]

We're working through our first 'proper' sprint and need some advice about best practice wrt User Stories and ownership.

ATM, a story is assigned to a developer who breaks it down in to a number of development tasks, s/he completes the tasks, recording the time taken. When the work is ready for test we assign the whole story to the test team lead who will, if necessary, reassign to someone in the test team and they will add the test cases and do what it is that they do. Once the tests are complete (and all passed) the story is marked as Done.

Now, as a practice I don't suppose that there is too much wrong with it, except the only team members with any work recorded against their names are members of the test team. This is what leads me, personally, to believe that we're not quite doing it right.

What is the "best practice" in this case?

-- 
Curious of Grantham

[Robert Régnier]

Hi Stuart,

 Although we started using TeamPulse is same way you are now, we found the same unpleasant consequence where the current ownership of stories would we be with the last QA that worked with the story and marked it as done.  As a a result, we ended up assigning the story to the development lead that has responsibility for it and creating tasks for any work related to the story, including QA work.  

So for example, a story that is assigned to a developer will have a task to create the acceptance criteria (assigned to a QA user) and also a task for reviewing (done by a dev peer), and testing the story (done by a QA user).  With this approach, the overall responsibility for getting the story done on time remains with the development lead and all of the other players involved, including QA, have tasks that can be assigned to them and worked against.

All the best,
Robert Régnier
the Telerik team

[Stuart Hemming]

Robert,

Thanks for the input. I like the idea. We're going to discuss this today.

-- 
Stuart

[Stuart Hemming]

Given that you have a number of 'standard' tasks, do you have a mechanism for creating these automagically? Or does some one have to create them all for each Story?

-- 
Stuart

[Robert Régnier]

Hello Stuart Hemming,

 No, we don't have any automatic ways to template stories such that standard tasks would already be created, not yet anyways :-)  We feel the same pain and it's in our backlog to add such a feature.

Kind regards,
Robert Régnier
the Telerik team