Items missing from Sprints

Question

Hi All,

I am doing SAFe and over the last week we have added all our sprints (6 total) and put all of our stories and bugs into the 6 sprints.  When I left on Friday, all was well.  When I returned on Monday my sprints were ALL empty.

My backlog actually didn't show the items either, so I was a tad freaked out.  I then went and looked at my release, and I could see all my items.

Nothing I did changed anything, until I created a new board based on the same project, then everything repopulated into my old board and new board.

What the heck?  What would cause that and why would creating a new board in the same project impact my old board.

I deleted my new board and everything was still okay.

Scratching my head on this one.  If anyone has ideas or thoughts, would love to hear them.

Thanks,

Samantha

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Yeah that is strange.   I'm afraid I can't say for sure what would explain the behavior you saw.  Certainly any changes to the filter in use for that board could explain why the issues might have disappeared from view or possibly a quick filter on a more temporary basis.

However only board administrators or Jira System admins would have the ability to change the filter on that board.  Maybe someone else changed the board filter in between the time you created a new board and then went back to the old board?  It's just a hunch, I can't say for sure that is what happened.

It might have just been a fluke, but certainly let us know if you see this kind of behavior again.  I am interested to see if we can learn more about what might have caused this.

Samantha Sieverling_8aboq0 · Answer

Hi Andrew,

This is a classic Scrum Project.  It is Scrum.  The new board was also Scrum.

The filter being used for both of the boards is very generic:

project = ProjectName ORDER BY Rank ASC

I have three quick filters:

labels = hotfix

assignee = currentUser()

updatedDate >= -1d

As you can see, very very basic.  And of course if you check them all the items go away if there is nothing in the filter, such as hotfix.

My first thought was filters as well, I checked those first.  At the time no quick filters were checked.  And again, until I created the new board, the only way I could see the issues was to go look at the release I had put them in.  They were still all there.

When I created the new board, they immediately showed up in the new board.  Then I went back to my original board and they were all back, no changes that I was aware of (I do have a team of 10 Dev's that use this board but the hour was probably to early for them to be messing with things).

There was nothing in the audit log that looked like it could be a problem.  Interestingly someone from another team had moved one issue into their sprint incorrectly the night before, but it had been put back by the time I looked in the audit log and both moves showed in the audit log.

Andy Heinzer · Answer

That doesn't make sense to me either.  The creation of a new board should have zero affect on the view of other boards.   But I am interested to learn more about this in case there is something strange happening here.

* What kind of project was this?  Classic or Next Gen?
* What kind of board did you have originally? Scrum or Kanban?
* What kind of board was the new board? Scrum or Kanban?

The only thing I can think of would be if the quick filter was set on the board to only show issues that match an additional JQL query.  This could hide all the issues in your sprints if they fail to match that JQL query when that quick filter is enabled.  However creating a new board should have no effect on the quick filter of the original board.

Creating a brand new board would tend to start with the default quick filter options and none of them enabled though.   I would be interested to learn about your original board's configuration.  If this is next gen, the configuration options are limited and different.  But if this is a Classic project, then you should be able to see more info here by going to the board, in the top right corner, click the ellipsis menu ( ... ) and select the option for Board settings.

Things to note here:

* Under General, I'd want to know the filter query being used on this board.
* If this is a Kanban classic, Also please note the subfilter query here.
* Under quick filters, what filters do you have listed here?  
* You could try to toggle some of these quick filters to see if perhaps they would temporarily hide all the issues you have there.   Of course selecting the quick filter again will undo this and in turn should restore

I suspect a quick filter is to blame, but I am open to other possibilities here.