When closing a sprint, some issues move to the next sprint but some move to the backlog

Question

Hi,

We have multiple scrum teams all using the same project and same sprints. The project is set so that unfinished issues get moved to the next sprint. Randomly (or at least seemingly so) when we close a sprint, some issues get moved to the next sprint as expected, but some get moved to the backlog. That is the problem in a nutshell. The "problem with the problem" is, after some thorough troubleshooting, we can't seem to drill down on a root cause and thus don't know how to reproduce the issue. As best well can tell, the issues getting erroneously moved to the backlog have nothing in common. There is nothing in the audit history to indicate they were handled differently than the issues that were moved to the subsequent sprint as intended. Given the number of issues per team per sprint that we are averaging, this is proving to be quite problematic. All suggestions welcome :0)

John Funk · Answer

No flag that I am aware of. I would open a support ticket with Atlassian next time one of them ends up in the Backlog. That way they can sort it out right then.

Danny Davidson · Answer

Thanks for answering John. The sprints are a set to roll the incomplete issues to the next sprint. most sprints everything rolls forward as expected. However, sporadically we encounter the aforementioned problem even though we haven't changed any settings related to closing a sprint since starting the project. That said, even if we weren't seeing the option for where to move the incomplete issues when closing a sprint, I don't believe that would account for the fact that only some issues were being sent to the backlog. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't a flag\indicator that could be toggled which would allow this behavior.

John Funk · Answer

Hi Danny,

According to the documentation:

* If the sprint has incomplete issues, you'll be asked to move them to one of the following:

* The backlog

* Any future sprint, or

* A new sprint

That's in here: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/sprints

If you are not getting asked, I would open a support ticket with Atlassian:

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/