Jira 9.6 introduces a fix and two potential permanent resolutions for the following known issue: a closed or completed sprint gets automatically removed from the Sprint issue field when you’re moving issues to a different project.

The issue has been tracked in the ticket JSWSERVER-13333 - Moving Jira issues to a new project will automatically delete closed/completed sprints from the Sprints field

History of change

Since Jira 8.8, all sprints in the status “Closed“ have been automatically removed from the Sprint issue field when the user is moving issues to a different project. The goal of this behavior has been to remove irrelevant sprints from the velocity report.

The user isn’t notified about the removal of closed or completed sprints, which results in data loss.

Although now, the user can decide whether irrelevant sprints should display in the velocity report, the issues of data loss and insufficient transparency of the system behavior remain.

Updates in Jira 9.6

The following components have been removed:

• The feature flag unlink.sprints.on.issue.move responsible for the unwanted behavior.

• The @ExperimentalApi methods from SprintIssueService:

  • ServiceResult removeIssuesFromHistoricalSprints(@Nullable ApplicationUser user, @Nonnull Collection issues);

  • ServiceResult removeIssuesFromHistoricalSprintsNoPermissionCheck(@Nullable ApplicationUser user, Collection issues);

Options of permanent solutions

We’ve come up with the following solutions for the issue and would like to know your opinion on them:

1. When moving issues to another project, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to keep or remove closed or completed sprints in them. Vote for this solution and leave your feedback in JSWSERVER-11992 - As a Jira Software user, I would like to be warned when moving issues which are in a sprint
2. Before moving issues to another project, you’ll be able to manually remove closed or completed sprints from them. Vote for this solution and leave your feedback in JSWSERVER-15615 - Remove issue from Sprint before moving it to another project

We’ll consider your feedback to develop and implement the optimal solution.