Ending a Sprint
This page only applies to Scrum boards. If you are using a Kanban board, please see Releasing a Version (Kanban).
On the final day of the sprint the team will complete the sprint — this will usually occur immediately prior to the sprint demo and retrospective. Any issues not completed at the end of the sprint will be moved to the next planned sprint, as they did not meet the team's definition of "Done". If you do not have a next planned sprint, they will be returned to the backlog.
Related pages:
To end the active sprint:
- Click the Agile link's down-arrow in the top navigation bar, then select your preferred board from the resulting dropdown menu.
- Click Work.
- Click the dropdown next to the sprint name to display a dialog box (see Screenshot 1 below).
- If you wish, edit the Sprint Name, Start Date or End Date.
Click the Complete Sprint button.
Why can't I end a sprint?
- You need to be a JIRA 'Project Administrator' permission in the project(s) whose issues are included in the sprint, to complete the sprint. For example, the filter for your board may be including issues from a project where are not a project admin.
Your issues (not including sub-tasks) must all be 'Done'. This means that all your issues must be in the right-most column on your board in Work mode.
What statuses represent "Done" in JIRA Agile?When you configure the board, the right-most column has a green bar. For issues to be interpreted as 'Done' on your Scrum board their status needs to be mapped to that column.
- When you try to close a sprint, and you have parent issues not 'Done' but all sub-tasks are 'Done', or vice versa, you will be prompted to make the parent 'Done' before continuing. If you're receiving errors for parents or sub-tasks that you believe are in fact Done, ensure that they are mapped correctly.
What should I do upon ending a Sprint?
Typically, at the end of a Sprint, you conduct a retrospective of the Sprint. When you complete a Sprint in JIRA Agile, you will be shown the Sprint Report. If you have Confluence linked to your JIRA instance, you can create your retrospective notes as Confluence pages and link them to your Sprint Report.
Other actions that occur at the end of a Sprint:
- Your issues will move out of Work mode.
- Any issues not completed at the end of the sprint will be moved to the next planned sprint, as they did not meet the team's definition of "Done". If you do not have a next planned sprint, they will be returned to the backlog and will be visible in Plan mode.
- Because Scrum teams usually track completed issues by version rather than by sprint, your issues will not be marked with the date the sprint was closed.
- Once a sprint is closed, you cannot re-open it. If you need to view the contents of the sprint again, you can select that sprint in the Sprint Report.
Tip: You can find issues belonging to all closed sprints by using theclosedSprints()function. For details, please see the JIRA JQL documentation.
Screenshot: Completing a Sprint
You can release the sprint as a version if you wish
Many Scrum teams don't release a version at the end of a sprint, but if you need to, it's easy to do. In the Completed Issues section of the Sprint Report, just click View in Issue Navigator. You can then use JIRA's Bulk Edit to assign all of the issues to the relevant version (for details, please see the JIRA documentation on
). Note that you will not be able to do this if your "Done" column sets an issue's status to "Closed", as issues are not editable once they are "Closed" (but "Resolved" is fine). Also note you can only Bulk Edit the "Fix Version" for issues from one project at a time.