Issues appearing in sprints that have not been previously added

[Steve Anacker]

Hello,

Here is my situation, we have done our sprint planning and set the sprint.  I will go to start the sprint, once I start the sprint, I will have previously closed or cancelled items showing up on the sprint board.  I have worked with my product owners to only use newly created sprint and not rename sprints.  My product owner also have a tendency to create sprints to use as work buckets for sorting, I have discouraged and  minimized this as well however the issue keeps  occurring.  Do any of you have any idea what is going on? I suspect that this is a usage problem and not a bug.

[Marianne Miller]

Steve,

What is happening is that the Sprint field is populated with the value of the current Sprint even though the item is closed.  My PO does the same thing and plans a lot of work for "future sprints" by adding it that Sprint.

During the course of work, some items may become obsolete or completed through other work and are closed either by the PO or a developer in the course of business.  This has caused the exact situation you refer to.

My solution has been twofold.  

1.  Reinforce the importance of remove the future Sprint from the Sprint field if they are closing it prior to that Sprint.

2.  I have a created a filter for my Sprint Review Dashboard to highlight closed items that are scheduled for a future Sprint

project = XXX AND status in (Closed, "Ready to Deploy", Deployed, Done) AND Sprint in futureSprints() ORDER BY Sprint.

where XXX = your project

and yes, we do have a custom workflow, so just be sure to include any of your "done" statuses

It's a little clunky, but we now review this value as a group in Grooming/Sprint planning to ensure that our new Sprint isn't cluttered with closed items.

I hope this helps,

Thanks,

Marianne