How to Track Jira Sprint History and Find Tasks from Deleted Sprints

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Have you ever opened a Jira board and noticed that tasks disappeared from the sprint?

In many cases, the tasks weren’t deleted; the sprint itself was deleted, renamed, or modified. The problem is that native Jira tools are not very helpful in identifying what has changed, particularly after a sprint has been deleted. Teams have difficulty determining which tasks should have been in the sprint, who removed them, and when the changes were made.

The limited visibility into sprint changes can pose significant problems for teams in the following situations:

• Sprint retrospectives
• Release investigations
• Compliance audits
• Project reporting
• Team accountability reviews

In this article, we’ll show how to track Jira sprint history and find tasks from deleted sprints easily and quickly.

What Happens When a Sprint Is Deleted in Jira

Tasks that belonged to a sprint remain in the project even after the sprint is deleted in Jira. Depending on your Jira workflow and board settings, tasks from the deleted sprint may move automatically to the next sprint or return to the backlog.

At first glance, this may not seem like a major problem, but it becomes one when teams need to investigate historical sprint activity.

For example:

• Which tasks were part of the deleted sprint?
• Who removed tasks from the sprint?
• Why did certain tasks disappear before release?

Unfortunately, native Jira functionality for tracking these changes is quite limited.

After deleting a sprint in Jira, it becomes really difficult to find the old sprint information; the sprint history gets spread across multiple tasks, and teams often have to check them one by one to understand what changes were made and when.  

This adds more work for the project managers and compliance teams.

How to Track Deleted Sprints and Find Related Tasks Using Native Jira Functionality

Jira stores sprint history information at the task level. That means that you can investigate deleted sprint changes manually. However, the process is quite limited and time-consuming, especially for large projects.

Let’s explore the most common ways available for tasks previously assigned to a deleted sprint.

Option 1: Check Jira Task History Manually

Let’s explore a case: in Jira, there is a project DESIGN, and sprint DES Sprint 7 was deleted. The tasks from that sprint moved to the next one (DES Sprint 8). You need to identify which tasks currently in DES Sprint 8 were previously in DES Sprint 7.  One way to find out is to open individual tasks from DES Sprint 8 and review their histories.

To do this:

1. Open a Jira task.
2. Navigate to the Activity section and go to the History tab.
3. Look for changes in the Sprint field.

You can see that the task was in the DES Sprint 7 but was moved to DES Sprint 8.

However, this method only works if:

• You already know which tasks to check
• You are ready to investigate tasks one by one

For large projects, this quickly becomes impractical.

Option 2: JQL Searches

Also, many teams try to use JQL to identify sprint-related changes. However, if the sprint was deleted, Jira often removes its reference from the searchable history. As a result, the query may return no results even though tasks previously belonged to that sprint.

So, this method won’t help you in such a case. 

How to Track Tasks from the Deleted Sprint with Issue History for Jira App

Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app centralizes historical task changes, making it much easier to track sprint history, even after a sprint has been deleted. Using the app, teams don’t need to check Jira tasks one by one; they can search for sprint changes across projects, users, and time periods in a single view.

Now, let’s explore the same case that was mentioned above: tasks from DES Sprint 7 automatically moved to the next sprint (DES Sprint 8), the original sprint disappeared from the board, and the team needed to identify which tasks currently in DES Sprint 8 previously belonged to the deleted DES Sprint 7.

So, to identify which tasks are currently in DES Sprint 8 that were previously in DES Sprint 7, it is necessary to do the following: 

• Install Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app from the Atlassian Marketplace, and after that, open it from the Apps menu in Jira.
• You can use the app's Table View, apply filters by sprint and date range, and add a sprint field in the Column menu. It allows you to get the info on what tasks from the DES Sprint 8 were in the DES Sprint 7. 

• Or you can use the Activity View in the app, apply the sprint filter, and use the Search functionality to get the list of Jira tasks that were in DES Sprint 7. 

• If needed, the received reports can be downloaded from the app in Excel, CSV, or PDF formats. 

Using Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app, it is possible to quickly understand:

• Which Jira tasks belonged to the deleted sprint
• Which tasks moved to the next sprint
• Who performed the changes
• When the changes happened

This method can be especially helpful for Scrum Masters, project managers, team leads, compliance teams, and Jira admins.

Need Better Sprint History Tracking in Jira?

Track sprint change history, investigate deleted sprints, and identify moved tasks with Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app.

Learn more about Issue History for Jira on Atlassian Marketplace

Summing Up

It can be quite hard to keep track of tasks from the deleted using the native functionality of Jira.

Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app makes this easy by saving sprint history even after a sprint is deleted. Teams can quickly identify which tasks belonged to deleted sprints, which tasks moved to another sprint or backlog, and who made the changes. And all from a centralized view.

This simplifies sprint investigations, making them quicker, easier, and more reliable for many teams who actively use Jira.