My sprint was accidentally deleted by another Jira user in our company - how can I stop this?

[Tony Palmer]

Here is some more detail from the person who deleted the sprint:

"One of our testers had created two new issues and somehow attached them to your sprint. The confusing thing for me was that, when I moved those two issues out of your sprint into our sprint, your sprint title remained on my board, albeit empty. That made me think it had become part of our project.  I then deleted your sprint from our board."

This resulted in my sprint being permanently deleted and issues going to the backlog.  Note that the above user is not working on my project or sprint board.

How is it possible for a user who is not a named administrator or developer for the project for which a sprint was created to delete that sprint?  And how can I prevent this from happening again?  Note that under Project Settings/People I have specifically named only those working on the project and removed any group access.  Clearly this does not stop others from causing problems.

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Tony,

Sprints themselves are not bound to a single project.  So they can appear in multiple boards across multiple projects, that part is by design. 

In order for that user to add issues to your sprint though, they would have been required to have the Manage Sprint permission on the project level.  This project permission could also allow them to delete a sprint, but only if they have this permission set for them for the project where the sprint was created and for all the projects of the issues contained in that sprint.

More details on this permission in Managing project permissions.  I would check to make sure that this user doesn't have that manage sprint permission in your project.  That should be sufficient to prevent them from deleting any sprints you created within your board, presuming these contain issues from your project.   It gets a little more complex if you're using a very complex JQL filter for a board that pulls issues from multiple projects. In those cases, you tend to need that specific permission in each project to be able to manage that sprint.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Tony Palmer]

Thanks Andy this is helpful.  It appears we have a default permission scheme where virtually anyone in the organisation can do anything in any project (slight exaggeration).  So I have set up a custom permission scheme for our team and associated it with our project.  Hopefully this will prevent accidental sprint deletions in the future.

Regards,

Tony

[Andy Heinzer]

Sorry to hear there was a loss of data here, but glad to hear that it sounds like you have adjusted the permissions here to prevent this.

[Tapan Shah]

Exact same scenario happened here.

JIRA should do more to provide alerts here, especially if the Sprint has tasks attached to it (albeit under a different board)