Old sprints still lingering even through the projects are deleted

Question

I have a Jira Software Cloud site that's around 10 years old.

I've recently been doing housekeeping and trashing > permanently deleting historical Jira Projects.

In the Create Issue screen, I include the "Sprint" field to easily add a candidate item into a Future Sprint (or the current Active Sprint).

I noticed the "Only show sprints in this project" checkbox:  out of curiosity, I unchecked it and I noticed _loads_ of sprints from the historical, and now permanently deleted, Jira Projects.

I believed this was because the Sprint might have existed in existing issues but JQL 'sprint = "[an example sprint that is no longer in use]"' returns 'no issues found', so that's not it.

I then checked "Boards > View All Boards" in case the data is in an historical board, but only boards in my current projects are there, so that's not it either.

Does anyone know where these historical sprints are coming from, and moreover how to purge these historical sprints from Jira Software Cloud so they don't clutter my "Sprint" field drop-down in the Create Issues screen?

Michael_ji8rn8 · Answer

This is exactly what. I had to do.  I had projects I setup as a test before importing from another system.  I had several sprints to go through workflows etc.

Once I had the final project setup like I wanted, I deleted all the older projects, and emptied the trash.

In the end, I used the rest/agile/1.0/sprint/{Sprint_ID} api to delete the sprints.

For my process, I had a python script that would look up a sprint based on an ID I gave it (I started from 1 and moved up), it would retrieve the name, I confirmed I wanted it deleted, and would then ask again until I deleted every orphaned sprint.

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @Darren

They're stored separately (and, in Issue History) as Sprints aren't tied to a Board - they're just created there.

As far as I know the "Sprint" data in the Sprint Report is coming from any issue that has one of those Sprints assigned - so if they're old Sprints which were never used, it might be quite hard to find them on the GUI.

You might be able to...

* Create a Test Project
* Create one issue, and assign all irrelevant sprints to it
* Filter the board for this Test Project

...and then see if they appear. It could be quite manual though unless you already have a definitive list of sprints.

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I guess what hygiene steps you should take depends on your circumstances - I would...

* Use consistent naming for sprints to make it easier to identify old vs new ones - eg. Sprint 1 CY24Q1
* Have board hygiene checks, to ensure empty or unused sprints are being removed
* Teach users to keep their sprints in check, and self-sufficiently remove unnecessary items

Ste

Darren_3xxj1j · Answer

hi @Ste Wright

thanks for these suggestions.

I just did the first one (Create Filter to look at all projects (I only have 4 in the instance, none in trash (I permanently deleted them); i.e., I don't have any 'inactive' ones, so the filter just says "ORDER BY Rank ASC" i.e. it returns all issues in the instance) and created a Scrum Board to use that Filter then examined its Sprint Reports.  No, the historical sprints aren't there.

I'll have a go at the REST API suggestion next...

Would you happen to know where the "Sprint" field drop-down is getting these historical sprints from, though?  Moreover, I'm wondering what I didn't do (that I should have done) that's caused all these legacy sprints to remain in the system...  Any ideas?