A redditor asked the following question:

Question#

Does QA time included in the story points?

Hi everyone, for the story points for the QA. How do you manage this? Is the story points indicated in JIRA ticket a sum of the story points for dev and QA?

My suggestion#

A little story from my team.

A few years ago, my team used to estimate development and testing, and the final estimate was the sum of the two.

Then we learned how to do small commits to the trunk in a safe way (as trunk-based development or continuous delivery suggests), and we came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense to estimate testing and development separately anymore, because testing became more continuous, it wasn’t a phase anymore.

Then we learned how to break larger stories into smaller ones, and finally we stopped estimating because now our stories are more or less the same size.

After a while we also stopped using iterations and our process changed to a more Kanban approach. We also stopped doing backlog refinement sessions, which we had on the calendar as recurring meetings. Instead of refinement sessions, we just add stories with a small goal, and we do discovery as we work on a story. Sometimes we discuss a topic right after a daily meeting if we need to.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t copy our ideas, but I think the most important thing about agile is change. Your process should evolve. If you look at how you did things six months ago, the current process should be slightly different.

So if you want, you can estimate testing separately, but if you do your retrospection right, you will eventually drop that idea, because it is not very agile, to be honest. 😀