Symptoms

A user has 'Administer Projects' permission in all issues included in a planned sprint. Nevertheless, they can't start the sprint - the Start Sprint link is greyed out for them.

Cause

The board filter where the Sprint was created originally includes more projects, in which the respective user isn't an administrator. As described in the documentation article: Starting a Sprint, permissions in all projects returned by the filter are required to start a sprint, even when not all projects are included in a particular sprint or returned board JQL.

 Example: when an exclusive condition is used in the filter query, e.g. project not in (ABC, XYZ), starting a sprint will require administrator's access to all other projects in the instance, even if board JQL (eg: label = ps and project not in (ABC, XYZ)) returns only some of them. 

 If the JQL of the filter contains "OR" JIRA will skip the permissions check and the user will need to have manage sprint permissions in all Software Projects. 

You can use the SQL query below to find out the Board and filter being considered for any specific Sprint, replacing the "Name of the Sprint" part.

select S."ID", S."NAME", R."ID", R."NAME", SR.reqcontent,S.* from "AO_60DB71_RAPIDVIEW" R 
join "AO_60DB71_SPRINT" S on S."RAPID_VIEW_ID" = R."ID" 
join searchrequest SR on SR.id = R."SAVED_FILTER_ID" 
where S."NAME" in ('Name of the Sprint');

An invalid JQL on the original board may also cause this, as a result of project renaming ( JRASERVER-30467 - Getting issue details... STATUS )

Resolution

• Grant the user administrator permissions in all projects on a board.
• Update the original board's filter to only include the desired projects

• Alternatively, modify the board filter to exclude projects that the user cannot administer.