Jira scrum board - 'complete sprint' action moves some stories to backlog instead of next sprint

Amir Katz (Jira Admin)

I have a scrum board. In the current sprint there there are ~90 completed stories and 8 incomplete ones.

When I invoked the 'Complete Sprint' action it prompted me what to do with the incomplete ones. I chose 'move to next sprint' and chose the specific sprint.

Out of the 8 stories, 5 stories were moved to the selected sprint, as it should be, but 3 stories were moved to the backlog.

AFAIK, the 'complete sprint' action does not care about the columns in the board - it decides which action to take on each story based solely on the Status Category of each story.

Any idea why the different behavior?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The "complete sprint" action absolutely cares about the columns.  If something is in the last "done" column it does not move to the next sprint, because it's done.

I suspect what you are seeing is that the three issues that went back into the backlog were items that had not moved to any in-progress column - no-one in the team has even looked at it.

8 issues incomplete tells us that you have a problem with the team and you need to review your processes.  There should be none moving to the next sprint, it is an exception and it needs explaining so you can improve.  The usual reason is poor estimation, undersizing stories so the team takes too much into the sprint.  One issue every couple of sprints is probably going to happen when people get sick or there is an emergency that takes people out of the team, but 8 issues is very much "your team is failing somewhere"