Planning sprints
Creating a sprint
You can create a sprint for your current iteration, or multiple future sprints if you want to plan several iterations ahead.
- Navigate to the Backlog of your desired board.
- Click the Create Sprint button at the top of the backlog.
Once you have created a sprint, you can add issues to it, as described in 'Adding issues to a sprint' below.
Tip: Need to record your planning meeting notes somewhere? If you have JIRA Software connected to Confluence, you can create a 'Meeting Notes' page via the Linked pages link. See Linking a Confluence page to a sprint for details.
Adding issues to a sprint
In Scrum, scope creep during a sprint should be avoided. In addition, the team is supposed to deliver a working piece of software at the end of the sprint. This means that you need to know your team's capacity for work, as well as the amount of work they are committing to, when adding issues to a sprint.
Typically, your team would estimate issues before adding them to the sprint, so that you can see the total estimated work for the sprint (in the sprint footer). You can match this against your team's capacity for work by looking at past sprints. Tools like the Velocity Chart and Burndown Chart can help you with this. Don't worry if you don't have any historical data — you'll get a good idea of your team's velocity once they start completing sprints.
Note:
- Sub-tasks cannot be moved independently of their parents.
- An issue can only be assigned to one active sprint or future sprint. This means you can't add an issue to both an active sprint and a future sprint at the same time.
- You can add any issue to any active or future sprint, even if the issue doesn't match the filter query of the board where the sprint was created. When you do this:
- the issue is assigned to the sprint, but will not be visible on boards where the filter query excludes it.
- any sprint actions (e.g. start sprint, close sprint) that span multiple boards will also affect the sprint in all boards where the sprint is visible.
- if the issue doesn't match the filter query of any agile board, the issue will be linked to the sprint but not appear in any board.
- A sprint appears in any board — a single board or multiple boards — as long as the issues assigned to the sprint match the filter query of the board or boards. This also applies to completed sprints.
There are three ways to add an issue to a sprint:
If you want to remove an issue from a sprint, just drag it to the Backlog, or right-click and select Send to Top of Backlog/Bottom of Backlog. You can also edit or bulk edit issues to remove the value from the Sprint field of the issues.
Once you have chosen which issues to include in your next sprint, you are ready to start the sprint, as described in the 'Starting a sprint' section below.
Starting a sprint
You can only start a sprint, if:
- You haven't started one already. If you want to have more than one active sprint at a time, try the Parallel Sprints feature.
- The sprint is at the top of the backlog. If you want to start a planned sprint that is lower down, you will need to reorder your sprints to move it to the top. (Note, this doesn't apply if Parallel Sprints is enabled).
To start a sprint:
- Navigate to the Backlog of your desired board.
- Find the sprint that you want to start and click Start Sprint.
If you haven't estimated your issues, you will receive a warning when starting the sprint (unless you are using Issue Count, as this is calculated automatically). - Update the Sprint Name, if desired, and select the Start Date and End Date for the sprint.
Note, the default duration of a sprint is two weeks.
You will be taken to the Active sprints, where issues in your newly started sprint will be shown.
You can still view your active sprint in the Backlog, and even add and remove issues from it. Be aware that adding and removing an issue from the active sprint is considered to be a 'scope change' and will be reflected in some reports, e.g. the Burndown Chart.
Editing, reordering, or deleting a sprint
Sometimes, you may need to modify sprints after they have been created, particularly if you are managing a large backlog. You can edit the name and dates of a sprint, reorder a sprint, or delete a sprint in the Backlog.
To edit the name or dates for a sprint, click on the sprint name or date fields to edit them. Note, you can only edit sprints that have not been completed yet. Also, the date fields are not specified until you start a sprint.
To delete a sprint, click the icon (next to Start Sprint) for the sprint that you want to move, then click Delete sprint. Note, you cannot delete the active sprint, you can only complete it. You also cannot delete closed (i.e. completed) sprints.
To reorder a sprint, click the icon (next to Start Sprint) for the sprint that you want to move, then choose Move sprint up or Move sprint down. Note, you can only reorder planned sprints (not the active sprint or closed sprints). Also, if you have the same sprints (or some subset of them) on different boards, the sprint order will be reflected across the boards.
Viewing the issues in a sprint
Use the Backlog of a board to view planned sprints. If you want to view a sprint in progress, use the Active sprints of a board instead. You can also use JQL in the issue search (Issues > Search for issues > Advanced) to search for a sprint's issues.
For example, to search for issues that are in the sprint, "February 1", use this query:
sprint = "February 1"
For more information on how to search for issues by sprint:
- See the JQL documentation on the
sprint
field ('Fields Reference' section), - See Advanced searching functions on the
closedSprints()
andopenSprints()
functions.
Next steps
Need help? If you can't find the answer you need in our documentation, we have other resources available to help you. See Getting help.
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