Is there a best practice for tracking feature development in a single ticket?
Our current process: We have three parts to feature development; requirements, development, and testing. To track this work in JIRA we use 3 individual story tickets. When the requirement story is done we close that ticket and start the development ticket, and when complete we move on to testing... a simple process that works fairly well. In addition, each story (req's, dev, test, ) is created so it can complete within a sprint. End result is that feature development can take 3 sprints and along the way we're able to close those story tickets and take credit for the points completed.
What I'm exploring: I'm interested in figuring out a process to track Feature development, that includes all the sequential steps (req's, dev, test) in a single JIRA ticket. Ultimately, I'm curious if it's more efficient.
Why: Reason for this possible change is that each step of our current process generates questions, new comments, screen shots, etc. So by the time it gets to testing the QA Engineer has to look through the past Requirements and Development stories to get history, updates, Q&A, etc. In my mind, it could be more efficient if engineers can work from a single ticket where they can see all the comments and changes. Looking through past tickets (although all related to the same feature) seems like a lot of context switching.
Here's where this gets tricky: I can't use the Epic-Story hierarchy. Our Epics are reserved for high-level (ie. 4-6 sprints) features. Meaning an Epic will have 10 +/- of these lower-level features, and it's these low-level features I'm interested in tracking in a single ticket.
From what I can tell, the Story-subtask hierarchy may be an option. But I don't know how to take credit for the sub-task points completed in a sprint.
Question: Does anyone have a process that works using a single JIRA ticket to track sequential steps?
Thanks