Sprint activated_date data issue

[Addison Ying]

I need to use sprint activated_date data to report on sprint metrics, but I see a lot of sprint in database has null value but the sprint is closed, why is that?

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Addison,

I understand that you are looking into the AO table of a Jira Server/DC database, and are interested to understand why many sprints listed there have a null value for the activated_date field.  I had to do a bit of digging to find this answer, but I think I have located it.

This field was not always in existence for Jira Software.  It was only added starting with Jira Software 8.8.0.  It was added as part of a feature implementation over in JSWSERVER-7740.  So any sprints created within Jira before that version would not have any value for this particular field.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Shubham]

Hi @Andy Heinzer ,

Thanks for providing the link. However, in the release notes Start Date is mentioned rather than the Activated Date which Addison is asking about.
So as per our understanding the Activated Date get its value whenever we click on the Start Sprint.
This Activated Date cannot be seen on the UI but it gets recorded in the table "AO_60DB71_SPRINT" as shown below.



As seen in the above snapshot, the sprint has values in Start Date, End Date and Completed Date but not in the Activated Date.
As stated by Addison, there are lot of Sprints that don't have Activated Date. There are also some who have the Activated Date.

So, we would like to know why some sprints have this Activated Date while some don't.

[Andy Heinzer]

The release notes in question explain that starting in 8.8.0, Jira Software now allows for future sprint start dates.  Before the 8.8.0 version, you could not set the start date of a sprint, unless you clicked the start sprint button, which would then begin the sprint.  If you clicked that button in older versions, it would record the epoch timestamp of when that button was clicked and store it in the start_date field of that table.

So all sprints that were started before that version (8.8.0) of Jira Software won't have an activation date.  They only have start dates.  This is expected.

But sprints that were manually started in a version such as 8.8 or higher, can have a value for the activated_date field.  I believe activated_date became a means to record the exact time the sprint was actually started, and not necessarily when someone planned to start it.  But this might only be if a planned future date was set for it. 

You might want to generate a support zip, this file should have some logs during startup that could help you to identify when your Jira Software instance was upgraded and what upgrade path it followed.  During startup of Jira, the log file can display a section that provides you previous upgrade versioning numbers and dates as to when the upgrade occurred. 

From your screenshot I can see that this epoch date in the START_DATE field converts to Tuesday, December 22, 2020 2:08:44.587 PM.  Perhaps you can use the Jira logs to confirm what version of Jira Software you were running on that date in order to determine if what I have deduced here is correct. I would expect if Jira was in any version lower than 8.8.0 on that date, it would be impossible to have an activation_date value.