Does removing the Sprints feature from a project remove the associated sprint data?

Question

Hi all,

Looking to test moving from Scrum to Kanban for a current project. We'd like to do a bit of a short term experiment in the team's way of working. If I was to disable the Sprints feature from the project i.e. move to Kanban board, would the associated Sprint data (Sprint field on the issues) be permanently deleted? I'm wondering as we may want to return to sprints in the future and would want to retain that data if possible.

Also, I'm assuming there's no loss of any issues in disabling the feature (all Done cards etc. are kept). Is this the case?

Cheers

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Bleddyn Preece -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding to Walter's answer...You may encounter a different symptom to watch for:

Let's say you finish your last sprint before switching to use a Kanban board...and there are issues carried over (not completed) and which were "in progress".

Kanban teams typically use different measures to help than do Scrum teams.  Kanban teams may use Work in Progress (WIP) count, Lead Time, various types of Cycle Time, Throughput, Age of WIP, etc.  (Jira can only measure some of these.)

If some issues were already in progress, the "clock" is already started for work and so your Kanban measures may be larger than expected if the team doesn't remember this difference.  Look on the Atlassian interpretation of the Control Chart to see these.

Kind regards,
Bill

Bleddyn Preece · Answer

You're a braver person than I, @Walter Buggenhout! Thanks very much for the welcome and the speedy help.

Point noted about the gap in data. Will look to see if we can manage it through labels and a bit of cleaning up if we switch back.

Thanks again.

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Bleddyn Preece and welcome to the Community!

Believe it or not, but I decided to live dangerously for a moment and effectively tested this for you by totally disabling sprints in a real project. And I can assure you that no data were lost in the process. After re-enabling the feature, all data automagically appeared as they were before.

Keep in mind though that if you would start working in kanban mode for a longer time before deciding to switch back to sprints, your data from the past may still be there but with a major gap across the time you disabled the feature. That gap will never be filled obviously.

Hope this helps!