Sprint Close best practice

[Victoria Danner]

Our organization is relatively new to JIRA and Agile practices.  We've found that some of our teams close the sprint the evening of the last day of the Sprint, whereas others wait until the next day - close the current Sprint then start the next.

From a JIRA reporting standpoint - is there any difference?

Would appreciate knowing what other more experienced Scrum Masters consider best practice for managing close of Sprint.

[Vinu · Accepted solution]

Hi @Victoria Danner

Its best practice to have close out the sprint before the sprint end date and finish it off with your scrum calls.

Then before starting your next sprint its always advisable to reel in your team for the sprint planning session where you classify your issues and then you the sprint manager can start the sprint.

There are several Atlassian documents on how to plan sprints and its best practices. This should help you align your organization's scrum process with the established best practices.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/agile/sprint-planning-atlassian

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum

[Victoria Danner]

Thank you!  I will refer to these documents.  I was also interested if there is any impact to reporting (like Sprint report, Burndown) with end/starting sprint on same day (thus, there is an overlap of activity).  

[Vinu]

It wont allow you to set the start date as to be the same as the end date. Start date of the sprint must be before the end date. And eventually your total number of working days in the sprint will be zero which does not make much sense :)

[Carolyn Hinkel]

When I start a sprint, I'm using the start date/time of 12:01 am cst and an end date of 11:59 pm cst.  Is this necessary to do or should I close the current sprint and then start the next after the planning session?  I'm concerned that there is a gap in time that could affect reporting if the sprint end and start dates don't align.