Sprints - related to Boards or Projects?

Mykenna Cepek

After many years with Jira Cloud, I'm finding Jira Data Center to be a different beast.

With Jira Cloud, I feel pretty certain that creating a Sprint was relative to a Project, regardless of how many boards might have included that Project.

With Data Center, it appears that Sprints are relative to a Board. This surprised me, and is a bit frustrating. I'd like to use two Boards with one Project, but the Sprints only show on one of the two Boards.

My questions:

1. Is this accurate? It's what my testing shows, but am I missing something?
2. Historically, what sense does this even make? Boards are a view, after all.

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Mykenna Cepek 

I worked with Jira Data Center last about 4 years ago, so things may have changed, but this is my understanding for both Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center:

Sprints are initially created in a Board, but that is a "loose" coupling.

A sprint will display in a board if either of the following apply:

1. The sprint was created in that board.

2. The sprint has an issue in it that is within the scope of a board's filter.

When you initially create a sprint and it is empty, it will show only in the board where it was created.

Jira Cloud, at least, does not limit which issues can be assigned to a sprint. By editing the Sprint field in an issue directly, you can add that issue to a sprint that does not otherwise show up on boards that include that issue. Once you add that issue to that other board's sprint, that sprint will show up on any scrum board where the issue itself is visible.

On a given board, the sprint will show as its contents only the issue in it that are within the scope of the boards filter. So, it may not be apparent that issues outside the scope of the board have been added to the sprint.

In your case, if you want to have two boards for a project, and you want each of those boards to have different filters, but you want the boards to share sprints, then the sprints will appear in both boards only after an issue within the scope of each board is assigned to the sprint.

If you don't want to deal with having to add and issue from each board to the sprint, but you want the boards to share all their sprints, then I would suggest that you instead have just one board and use Quick Filters to allow users/teams to reduce the scope of what is visible to only the issues relevant to them.