Sprint Marker Migration

This page applies to JIRA Agile 6.3. It does not apply to classic boards or Kanban boards.

Background

We implemented future sprints into proper objects in JIRA in this release, so that you can perform common operations on them. For example, in this release, you can search for issues in a future sprint using JQL.

To do this, we have changed the relationship between sprints and issues. Previously, an issue would be defined as part of a sprint by the sprint markers. Also, sprint markers would only be displayed on the board that they were created in. This meant that you could have an issue that belonged to different sprints on different boards.

In this release, an issue belongs exclusively to a sprint. This allows you to do actions, like searching for issues in future sprints, as mentioned above. However, this also means that an issue cannot belong to more than one sprint at a time.

How does this affect me?

To enable this change, each board in your instance needs to be migrated before it can be used. When any logged-in user views the Plan Mode for a board, a migration task will automatically run for that board. This task will affect only issues in future sprints.

The task will do the following:

1. For each issue on the board, work out which sprint it belongs to, by the sprint markers.
2. Update the value of the Sprint field for each issue accordingly.
3. Place the sprint markers back on the board, based on the values of the Sprint fields for each issue.

In almost all cases, this will result in exactly the same board and sprint markers, as prior to the migration. 

The rare exception is if you have issues that belong to future sprints on two different boards — you may have this if you have a board set up to display issues from multiple projects or you are using a complex JQL filter for your board. In this case, whichever board is migrated first will "claim" the issues for the future sprint. When the second board is migrated, it will show the issues that were assigned to future sprints in both boards, in the future sprint from the first board that "claimed" the issues.

Pre-migration

Post-migration: Board 1 migrated before Board 2

If an issue belonged to two sprints, a comment will also be added to the issue at migration with a message similar to the following:

You can either plan the migration of your boards to assign the common issues to the desired sprints. It's also easy to change this after the boards are migrated by dragging and dropping the issue to the desired sprint.

Notes and known issues

• If a board is never viewed by a logged-in user in Plan mode, it will never be migrated. This is because if a board is not in use, then it is unlikely to have issues in future sprints that need migrating.
• Determining whether a board has been migrated — If you visit a board and view Plan mode, and you do not see a dialog, then the board has already been migrated. If you visit a board and view Plan mode, and you do see a dialog, then it will show you the progress of the migration. If the operation completes successfully, then it has worked.
  • You can also check whether a board has been migrated by querying the database directly — The SPRINT_MARKERS_MIGRATED field of the AO_60DB71_RAPIDVIEW table will be set to True if a board has already been migrated (False or Null means that it has no been migrated). If you would like further assistance with this, please contact support. Note, if you are using JIRA Agile with JIRA Cloud, you will need to contact support to query the database.
• The following message banner will only be shown to JIRA administrators (users with the Administer JIRA permission). Regular users of your JIRA instance will not see this message.
  
  This message will display until all boards have been migrated. If it still displays after you have migrated all the boards you can see, there may be boards that are hidden to you that have not been migrated yet.
  
  • If a board has not been shared with you and you cannot ask the owner to migrate the board(s), you can try using the SU for JIRA add-on to impersonate the owner and migrate/remove the board yourself. Note, you cannot do this in JIRA Cloud, and will need to request assistance from support instead.
• If your sprints appear greyed out in Plan mode after a board has been migrated, please read this KB article: Sprints are Greyed out in Planning Mode.
• A board that has not been migrated cannot be viewed by an anonymous user — it must be migrated first.