How to turn off completed sprint from appending to carry over stories

[Andrew Makar]

I noticed when I complete a sprint and have unfinished stories, the Sprint field contains the completed sprint name and the new sprint for the unfinished story.

Is this an option that can be turned off in the JIRA configuration?

Thanks!

Andy

[Mykenna Cepek]

Very interesting question!

There might be some options to get partway to your goal, using automation. There is a built-in trigger for "Sprint completed", and perhaps you could then do something with all the leftover issues.

I explored it a little bit yesterday, but wasn't able to find a solution that seemed worth posting. I'm happy to share some things I learned along the way, though:

• When using the "Sprint completed", "Sprint started" or "Sprint created" triggers, the {{sprint}} smart value is available in the rule.
• The "Sprint created" trigger might be more helpful for your use case than the "Sprint completed". The former likely puts the new sprint name into {{sprint}}, whereas the latter likely offers the old sprint name.
• It's easy to loop through all issues in a sprint, and perform actions on them. What's less clear is whether the "Issues in the sprint" branch rule component works on a sprint that is not started (since it's not the "current sprint").
• Even if you were able to use automation to move all the carried-over issues back to the Backlog, you'd still end up with an empty sprint to have to manually clean up. There is no "Delete sprint" action in automation.
• The "Edit issue" action unfortunately does not offer the "Add/remove values" option for the "Sprint" field, as is available for a field like "Labels". Very unfortunate, as that would be pretty helpful for this use case.
• However, a smart value like the following might be able to replace the "Sprint" field value wholesale. I did not test this; but I think it would remove just the last sprint value:

{{#issue.sprint}}{{^last}}..{{/}}{{/}}

• Jira does not create a new sprint if there are no incomplete issues remaining when you close a sprint.
• An alternate approach would be to create a rule that you would manually invoke before closing the sprint. I feel fairly confident that such a rule could handle your use case, even with all the concerns noted above.

If you find a solution, please share it back here! Best wishes!

[Andrew Makar]

Thank you for your guidance!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Andrew Makar 

I believe the answer is "no". 

The sprint field is a list type probably due to the scenario you note of carry-over issues.  This provides a valuable resource to teams to consider how much carry-over work they have, and to pause to consider why it happened and ponder ways to improve.  For example, improving refinement, planning, WIP management, etc.

Best regards,

Bill

[Andrew Makar]

Thanks Bill!  I appreciate the feedback.