Closing sprint and not taking "done" items with it

[Benedikt Ostwald]

Hi everyone

I've got the following issue. 

I've created a board on which I have the categories "Tasks";"In Progress";"Done";"Blocked".

I have several items in "Done". But when I want to close the sprint, it says there are null finished processes. 

What have I missed? 

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Benedikt Ostwald and welcome to the Community!

To be considered Done, your issues must be in the rightmost column of the board. It seems that you mapped blocked as that rightmost column. And so only your blocked items will be considered done that way, which is quite likely not what you want.

Make sure the Done column is at the very right on your board.

Hope this helps!

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Benedikt Ostwald -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding to Walter's answer...

In my experience, one of the challenges of making a board column / status for a "blocked" condition is blocking becomes a normal condition to the team.  And so teams are less likely to work toward reducing it in the future; instead they may see it as something that just happens to them.

As an alternative, teams may use the built-in Jira feature of Add Flag (or Remove Flag) for blocking conditions.  This will make them visible on the board, and often unusual enough to draw attention toward resolving the blocker and preventing similar ones in the future.

To learn more about this feature, please look here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/flag-an-issue/

Kind regards,
Bill

[Benedikt Ostwald]

@Walter Buggenhout 
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience and pointing me towards the right solution.
Indeed it was the order of columns which prevented JIRA from recognising the items as "done". 

@Bill Sheboy 
Thank you as well for a better alternative solution. 
I am using the column currently to put in Stories, which have Tasks linked to them. And I hold the Stories as blocked until all tasks are done. 

How would you handle this different? 

[Bill Sheboy]

@Benedikt Ostwald my ideas depend on if a team using Scrum or Kanban practices.

If a team is using Kanban practices, one approach is to distinguish "working" and "waiting" columns on the board: the board matches how the team works.  That could include columns named "X completed", where X refers to a prior process step.  For example:

Selected > Building > Build Completed > Testing > Test Completed > Releasing > Done

This both raises the visibility of pauses in flow and the impact on WIP by paused work.  And those can lead to experiments to improve how the team works.

Contrast this to a Scrum team, where they identify and eliminate the dependencies before starting the Sprint.  That is, they do not bring work into the Sprint which can be blocked by other work; instead they wait until the dependent items are done before selecting them for a Sprint.  Or if the dependencies are across different teams, the teams collaborate to eliminate dependencies by transferring ownership of the work to one team.