Closed or Resolved issues get automatically added to a new Sprint in Jira Server and Data Center
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
When working with Sprints on an Agile board, it might happen that the Jira application automatically add old (closed/resolved) issues to a new Sprint, without users realizing it. This behavior might be expected by design, or might be due to a bug in the Jira Software code. The purpose of this article is to present possible scenarios where this behavior will happen, and how to identify them.
Environment
Jira Software Server / Data Center 8.0.0 and any higher version.
Root Causes
Cause 1 - The closed issues are in a status that is not mapped to a column in the board configuration (Expected behavior)
If an issue that belongs to an Active Sprint is transitioned to a status that belongs to the "Done" category, the following will happen if the status is not mapped to any column in the board configuration:
- this issue will be missing from the Active Sprint page (it won't show in any column)
- this issue will be considered as an incomplete issue when closing the Sprint, even though the issue was resolved and the status is from the "Done" category
- if the option move open issues to it set to New Sprint, this issue will be add to a new Sprint upon completion of the current Sprint
Cause 2 - The closed issues belong to a Sprint that got deleted
If a Sprint is deleted from a board, all the closed issues that belonged to that Sprint will get automatically added to the next open Sprint that is available on the board.
This behavior is caused by a bug that is tracked in the public ticket JSWSERVER-21625 - Deleting a Sprint moves any closed issues on it to the top non-active Sprint on the board
Diagnosis
Diagnosis for Cause 1
To check if Root Cause 1 is relevant, check the points below:
- Open the issue that was added to the new Sprint and check the current status and the history tab. In the example below
- The status is "Resolved"
- In the history tab, we can see that this issue was originally just part of 1 Sprint (the one that got closed), and then later part of 2 Sprints (the closed Sprint and the new Sprint)
- Check the board's column configuration, and verify that the status the issue is in (Resolved in the example above) is not mapped to any column:
When diagnosing this cause, it's important to check the configurations of all boards whose filters include issues from the same project(s).
It's possible to have multiple boards in Jira pointing to the same project(s) but with different column configurations. In this scenario, the outcome of closing a sprint will depend on the configuration of the board whose Active Sprints tab the sprint was closed from. This can result in a situation where users of a correctly configured board complain that resolved issues moved to the next sprint, when the sprint was actually closed by a user of another board whose column configuration did not contain the correct status mappings.
Diagnosis for Cause 2
To check if Root Cause 2 is relevant, check the points below:
- The Sprint the issue used to belong to was deleted.
One way to check this is to look at the Tomcat Access logs located in the <JIRA_INSTALL_FOLDER>/logs directory, and to search for a DELETE HTTP request sent to the end point /rest/greenhopper/1.0/sprint/<ID_1>?rapidViewId=<ID_2> , where <ID_1> is the ID of the Sprint that was deleted (you can find this ID by checking the history tab of the issue), and <ID_2> the ID of the Board the Sprint was deleted from. For example:
XX.XXX.XX.XX 607x30531816x14 someuser [19/Aug/2021:10:13:06 +0200] "DELETE /rest/greenhopper/1.0/sprint/10100?rapidViewId=10020 HTTP/1.1" 204 - 347647 "<JIRA)BASE_URL>/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=0&projectKey=SCRUM&view=planning.nodetail&selectedIssue=SCRUM-123&issueLimit=100" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/115.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/115.0.1901.183" "1ooy1n4"
- You observed that the closed issue was automatically added to the new Sprint as soon as the new Sprint was started (and not before the Sprint was started)
- Take a look at the history of the closed issue that was automatically moved to the next Sprint, and check if you can see 2 entries as shown below:
- one entry without any old and new value (which corresponds to the time the old Sprint was deleted)
- one entry showing that the issue was added to the new Sprint (which corresponds to the time the new Sprint was started)
Solution
Solution for Cause 1
To prevent this scenario from happening in the future, make sure that all the statuses from the "Done" category are mapped to the last column of the board Columns configuration (and are not located in the Unmapped Statuses section), as illustrated below:
Solution for Cause 2
There is unfortunately no workaround for the bug JSWSERVER-21625 - Deleting a Sprint moves any closed issues on it to the top non-active Sprint on the board
The best suggestion is to never delete a Sprint that contains closed issues.
Alternatively, we recommend removing closed issues from this Sprint before deleting it, which can be done by following the steps below:
- Open each issue from the View Issue screen
- Edit the issue
- Clear the content of the Sprint field