Is it possible to create a story and assign to a future sprint automatically?

Question

Hi, I have setup a manually triggered automation that creates multiple stories, using info from the trigger story.  It's working fine, however I can't figure out how to get one of these stories to be assigned to the sprint I want.  The only options I seem to have are to copy the sprint of another issue or parent or to set it for the current or next sprint.  I want to assign this particular story to 2 sprints after the trigger issue.  Any tips?

Monica.Day · Answer

I wish Jira would be less concerned with forcing teams to follow some sort of set process. We all understand the sprint planning is important. However, there are tasks that a team may want to create and schedule for a future sprint. Like adding a task to remove a feature when a feature flag is added as part of a current ticket. Doing this would keep the workflow entirely within Jira as opposed to having users keep running lists of future work that needs to be scheduled for each sprint. Nor does it negate the overall premise of sprint planning.

My team creates the next three sprints in advance, as a matter of course, and moves high-priority stories to those sprints as work is refined. We also do this when we know we have dependencies and work must be done in sprint 1, before a secondary ticket can be tackled in sprint 2.  We ALSO sprint plan. We just start knowing what basic technical tasks need to be addressed.

@Tracey Harrington made a perefctly valid request. As a whole, I think Jira would benefit from greater responsiveness and adaptability to user requests. Repeating the most general application of scrum principles ignores the diverse reality of real-world applications.

Tracey Harrington · Answer

Hi Walter, thanks for your response :)    To give a little more info, the issue I want to create for 2 sprints later is a follow up/clean up task, that is sometimes overlooked or deemed able to be deferred (which then doesn't happen).  I have linked all the new tasks to the trigger task. The nature of the trigger task is such that it should rarely roll over for more than 1 sprint, and extremely unlikely to rollover for more than 2 sprints, hence why I wanted the new task scheduled for 2 sprints later. The automation is a way of ensuring the task is not forgotten about amongst competing priorities and sprint planners are forced to consider it in the upcoming sprint.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Tracey Harrington -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Although it is possible to use Jira Automation to assign issues to future sprints, I agree with the suggestions from @Walter Buggenhout that this may not be a helpful approach, even if the team later plans the sprint collaboratively.

What problem are you trying to solve with this pre-assignment?  That is, "why do this?"  Knowing that may help the community to offer additional approaches.  Thanks!

Kind regards,
Bill