Clicking start sprint adds old, completed tickets to the sprint

[Dan Witte]

Whenever we start a new sprint, old, completed tickets suddenly show up on our agile board. Any ideas why?

[Ruiz, Preston]

We noticed this behavior, too. This occurs when a story is closed and associated to a unstarted sprint (or is in the Backlog). The closed story disappears from the Planning/Backlog board. Upon starting the sprint, the closed story will re-appear.

As a work around (prior to starting the sprint), you can generate a query in JIRA (using Issues > Search for Issues) to identify all of the stories that are in that sprint. This will allow you to see if any stories are closed, and if so, move them out before you start the sprint. You will then need to determine how to handle these closed stories. Perhaps you're OK with the closed stories hiding in the backlog. If so, just move them to the bottom of the backlog (you'll have to re-open the stories so that  you can update/move it). If you'd prefer to remove them (without deleting them), you may consider creating miscellaneous sprint that you drop these stories into. You can then close that sprint to remove the stories from the Planning board. This prevents you from having the closed stories impact your new sprint metrics. 

Going forward, before a story is closed, it will be important to make sure the story is associated to an active sprint. 

This doesn't address why JIRA Agile behaves this way, but hopefully it gives you a few options for dealing with it. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sounds like they have not been "completed" as far as the board understands the term.

What do you mean by "completed" and is it clearly in the "done" column on the board?

[Dan Witte]

The tickets that have been closed show up in the done column, not sure about the deferred tickets. Why would they be showing up at all though? When looking at the Backlog view, they're not present.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, we probably need to look at a number of things, apologies for the brain-dump style list of stuff I'd start with: * Pick a sprint where this has happened - what is the definition of your "done" column in the board containing the sprint? * Pick an issue to look at, one of the old completed ones that is a problem, and look at the plain issue view in JIRA (i.e. not the "card" on the board) - What type is it? - Is that type a parent or a sub-task type - What is the status? - What is the resolution? - Does it have an Epic link? -- if it does, then what's the status and resolution of the Epic? - Does it have any subtasks? -- if it does, what status are they in?

[Dan Witte]

* "Done" = QA complete but there is also a Complete-Live status that is not represented on the board (would still be under "Done"). * type can be any (story, featured, bug, etc) * Status = deferred/closed * Resolution = done * Has been an epic on occasion * No subtasks