Why aren't dropdowns intelligent?

[Jason Burdey]

Overall JIRA is a pretty great product. However there are some things that don't make sense. For example, if I'm editing a ticket that is part of a project and I click the Sprint dropdown for example, why do I see options in the sprint dropdown that aren't for this project? Makes no sense. Why not filter for the sprints in the current project???

Similar, if I'm running a search and I pick a Project, then am trying to filter for a particular sprint in that project (Sprint 3 for example) ...I type Sprint 3 and I get no results but a bunch of sprint names from different projects. WHY ....doesn't it filter it based on the project I have already selected? Now it's a major pain for me to filter for the sprint and I'm not even sure how to do it because typing "Sprint 3" in the dropdown shows no results even though I have filtered for the Project and the list of issues shows issues assigned to Sprint 3. So frustrating. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I completely understand why this looks odd to you, and I personally think the UI could use some improvements here.

But "your question is predicated on a fallacy".  That's a phrase I heard a lot during science type sessions at my secondary and university education.  In non-grandiloquent language, it's trying to say "You have a valid question, but you have picked up something that is wrong and asked the question based on that"

In this case, the problem is that Sprints do not belong to Projects. 

A sprint is a collection of issues that you've told your product owner you are going to do in the timebox that the sprint represents.  A sprint might include all sorts of issues from many places.  My squad tries to do sprints, but the nature of the work makes it difficult, with every single attempt at a sprint hitting between 8 and 24 projects.

Jira does try to be a bit clever about sprints, but it has no choice but to display all sprints that might count when it's trying to filter.  It could do better, but to fix this problem at the moment, look to the board filters, try to chop them down to what they really need, then when you run searches for sprints, they should be a bit better.

[Jason Burdey]

I agree with what you are saying, however in JIRA sprints created inside of projects in the backlog of that project so until that is changed it should filter for that project.

I also wonder the use case of how many JIRA users are running multiple projects and assigning issues against a single sprint that crosses multiple projects? Or if a majority of users who are running multiple projects just have sprints in each of those projects and jump to different boards if they need to? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

But sprints are not created "inside projects".  They're created from boards, which could include many projects.  Hence they can't do it.  (Although my "fix" would be to get the code to parse the JQL for "project in" or "project =" type clauses so that they can)

On the subject of "how many people run cross-project boards", my experience gives me an answer of "most".  I'm less connected to development now, but in my last job, the organisation I worked for had about 3,500 active Jira users (i.e. using it to run their jobs), almost 1,000 active projects (and maybe 3-4,000 more mostly without active development, but still needed to be monitored for support).  I don't think I ever saw a board with only one project there!  More recently, as a consultant now, I do see more, but I would still say fewer than half of the boards I see are covered by just "project = x"

This ratio jumps massively upwards if you go to places doing Scaled Agile - generally a board represents a teams work and that goes across projects a lot more!  It's rare to see a large user base with single project boards.

[Jason Burdey]

Based on JIRA documentation, sprints are created inside projects. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/enable-sprints/

Boards can be created in a project or are based on a filter and that is why you can have issues from multiple projects displayed on that board. https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver/creating-a-board-938845220.html

Creating boards based on a filter is not something I have really used so it's something I will have to look into which seems cool. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Atlassian's docs reach that way, but if you're using that type of board, you can't possibly run into the problem you describe because you can't edit the filter as you have said you have.  So you must be using the boards that do not belong to projects.