Completing a sprint
Before you begin
- Sprints only apply to Scrum boards. If you are using a Kanban board, you may want to read this instead: Deploying a release.
To complete a sprint, you must be a Jira Administrator, or a user with the Manage Sprints permission, or Start/Complete sprints permission.
If you can't complete a sprint, your board's filter may be complex, and Jira Software is unable to determine which projects will be returned by the query. See Using Manage Sprints permission for advanced cases if you need help.
Completing the active sprint
- Navigate to the Active sprints of your desired board.
- If necessary, select the sprint you want to complete from the sprint drop-down.
- Click Complete sprint.
If you have multiple sprints in the Active sprints of your board, the Complete sprint button will not appear until you select one of the multiple sprints.
When you complete the sprint, the following actions will occur:
- Your completed issues will move out of Active sprints.
- You can move any issues not completed at the end of the sprint to one of the inactive sprints, the Backlog, or a new sprint.
- For sprints that have parent issues and sub-tasks:
- If you have parent issues that are 'Done' but sub-tasks that are not 'Done', you won't be able to end the sprint. You must complete the sub-tasks first.
- If you have parent issues that are not 'Done' but have sub-tasks that are all 'Done', the parent issues will still be moved to the selected future sprint or to the Backlog. If these parent issues are part of another active sprint, the previously completed sub-tasks are still 'Done'.
- Your issues won't be marked with the date the sprint was closed; however, you can always view the sprint for an issue to find out when the sprint ended.
Other tasks to complete at the end of a sprint
Conduct a retrospective and link your notes to the sprint
Typically, at the end of a sprint, you conduct a sprint retrospective. This is a meeting where your team discusses the completed sprint, including the things they need to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing. The outcome of this meeting should be actions for improvements in future sprints.
When you complete a sprint in Jira Software, you will be shown the 'Sprint Report', which provides helpful data about your sprint for your team's retrospective. If you have Confluence linked to Jira Software, you can also create your retrospective notes as Confluence pages and link them to your Sprint Report. See Linking a Confluence page to a sprint for more information.
Check the progress of your version
The end of a sprint is a great time to check how your version is progressing. See Checking the progress of a version for more information.
Release the sprint as a version (optional)
Your team may not need to 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 should have already pre-assigned issues to a version before starting work on them, (which results in better reports). However, if you need to specify a version for issues at this stage, use Jira's Bulk Edit to assign all of the issues to the relevant version (see Editing multiple issues at the same time for more information ). 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.
Start planning your next sprint!
Once you have completed a sprint in Jira Software, you can start getting ready for a new one. You can also plan a few sprints ahead adding start and end dates to your future sprints.
Note, you can only have one active sprint at a time, unless you've enabled Parallel Sprints.
Next steps
Need help? If you can't find the answer you're looking for in our documentation, we have other resources available to help you. Check out Getting help.
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