Working with Sprints

A sprint — also known as an iteration — is a short (ideally two to four week) period in which the development team implements and delivers a discrete product increment, e.g. a working milestone version. 

A sprint can span more than one project, if multiple projects are included in the board to which the sprint belongs.

Go to Plan mode to prioritise the issues in your backlog and allocate them to sprints. You can click a sprint's name to view the issues belonging to that sprint.

You can also use JQL to search for a sprint's issues. For details, see the JIRA JQL documentation on the sprint field, and the openSprints() and closedSprints() functions.

Sprints only apply to Scrum boards.

Screenshot: a Scrum board in 'Plan' mode (click to enlarge)

In Plan mode you can:

• Prioritise the Backlog — Create issues for your backlog, rank and estimate them, and drag-and-drop to add them to a sprint.
  Right-click selected issues (in GreenHopper 6.1.2 and later)  to add them to a sprint, send them to the top/bottom of the backlog, view them in the JIRA Issue Navigator or perform Bulk Operations.
• Estimate Stories — You can use the 'J' and 'K' keys to move through issues in the backlog and get details on the right-hand side of the screen. Plug in your estimates or story points as you go.
  Note that, by default, the Story Points field is only available to issues of type 'Story' or 'Epic' — you can change this as described in GreenHopper JIRA Configuration.
• Create Sub-Tasks — To break a story (issue) down into implementable chunks, go to the sub-task tab (click the folder icon) to view and create sub-tasks.
• Organise via Epics — Group related stories into an epic. Click an epic (in the leftmost panel) to view only the stories that belong to that epic.
• Plan Versions — Assign issues to upcoming versions. (To do this, you need your administrator to enable Release Planning in GreenHopper Labs.)
• Plan, and Plan Again — When you're happy with the stories for the iteration, start a sprint and the stories will move into Work mode. While a sprint is active in Work mode, you can still plan subsequent iterations in Plan mode (click Add Sprint), but you won't be able to start them until the active iteration is completed. (You can, however, drag and drop an issue in Plan mode onto the active sprint.) Note that you can only start (or complete) a sprint if you have 'Administer Projects' permission for all projects that match the board's filter.

An issue will only be visible in Plan mode if:

• the issue matches the board's Saved Filter (see Configuring Filters); and
• the issue's status maps to one of the board's columns (but not the 'Done' column).