Unable to complete sprint because " there are incomplete subtasks on the following issues"

Question

When I attempt to complete an active sprint I receive the following error message:

"Sprint cannot be completed as there are incomplete subtasks on the following issues:"

but all of the listed issues have been moved to later/different Sprints and are no longer associated with the Active Sprint.  Not sure what to do, as I don't want to close-out the sub-tasks of the listed issues, as they are not going to be part of a future sprint...

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

>"Sprint cannot be completed as there are incomplete subtasks on the following issues:"

>but all of the listed issues have been moved to later/different Sprints

Er, why?  That's not how Scrum works - you should never move issues to later sprints from an active sprint, it makes nonsense of your procesess.

>and are no longer associated with the Active Sprint

Actually, they are, because they were in the sprint, and to be able to report on them, you must have them still recorded as being in it.

The problem here is something you can prevent.  Your data is actually telling Jira you have issues in a superposition of being done, but not done at the same time, so t can't know what to do with them.  By definition, a story cannot be done if it has open sub-tasks, so you should never be putting an issue into the last column on the board unless all of its sub-tasks are in the column too.

The simplest way to prevent this problem is to edit the workflow - on any transition into the last column, add the "sub task blocking" condition.  (This has been around since Jira 3, so it's not something you'll need an app for)

Ben Hoyt_4g48pj · Answer

Hi Fabian. Thanks for the response.  I understand that, tho, and have done that several times in the past to close out a sprint.

in this case, however, the issues are no longer in the sprint. They have been moved to either an upcoming sprint, or the backlog. So, they really ought to remain open. I suppose I could complete them, then close out the sprint, and then reopen them. But that seems like a pretty hacky workaround.

It doesn’t seem like the issue should be occurring so I’m hoping to find a more elegant solution.

Fabian Lim · Answer

Hi @Ben Hoyt

Jira doesn't lie on this one and you will have to go through each completed issue one by one and check that all subtasks are closed. Also check for statuses that may not be displayed in your board. For example, people don't put the cancelled status in a board, but they could have subtasks that are not complete or closed.

Regards