How to handle overlapping sprints

[Henk van der Weele]

The company i'm working now is working with overlapping sprints. What is the best way to manage this with JIRA.

[Julia Jansson · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Jira offers the feature Parallel sprints, which allows you to have multiple active sprints at the same time. Follow the steps in this link to enable this feature: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/use-parallel-sprints/

Note that this feature only is available in company managed projects.

[Henk van der Weele]

How does that look like, Parallel sprints?

Does it work for 1 team that is working on 2 active sprints?

[Julia Jansson]

Yes, it should work for that.

The feature lets you start new sprints while ju already have one or more sprints started. You create and start the sprints in the backlog where you also have an overview of all the sprints. On the board you have the option to filter the issues to see only those belonging to a specific sprint or if you prefer to see all issues in all active sprints at once. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Henk van der Weele and welcome to the Community!

There's some pieces of information missing in your question to properly answer: what is in those overlapping sprints? Are you talking about multiple teams working on a different cadence? Is one team working on multiple products and using different sprints to differentiate work across those projects? It might not be a bad idea to step back from "how to manage this with Jira" and start by looking into "why is your company doing this in the first place" and what do they use the concept of a sprint for ...

When talking about work that is managed within the same team, overlapping sprints does not sound like a good idea to me. I am talking best practice here, not tools. A sprint is designed to give focus to your team to get work done in a set timeframe. Overlapping sprints from that perspective simply undermines that.

If these overlapping sprints are run by different teams, this becomes a different story. In agile at scale the recommendation is to align teams on the same cadence, simply because that reduces overhead of your overall, cross-team planning and tracking processes. But in Jira it would just be a matter of creating separate scrum boards for your separate teams. As sprints are created from a board, that would allow your teams to follow their own cadence from within their own board, without impacting the rhythm of other teams.

Finally, there is the option to run parallel sprints on the same board. But as you will see in the article I linked in the previous sentence, there's some caveats in terms of usage.

Hope this helps!

[Henk van der Weele]

Hi Walter,

You are right, some context was missing.

This is the case.

They have a 4 weeks cycle for a release. 2 weeks development off-shore and two weeks testing by the company. When we start to test, the off-shore developers start to work on the next release. and so on.

So, we have two active sprints. You can say a sprint for off-shore developing and a sprint for in-company testing, but that is not really stricked, there is some overlap as well.

I agree that we have to look at this wow, but it is my first month.