JIRA Agile won't let me start sprint

Question

Background: Our JIRA Agile setup has a separate board for each team.  Each team has their own project.  There is one shared project that houses all the Epics.

Problem: There is one board cannot start a sprint and get the error "Error  There can only be one active sprint on each board", but if they go to the "Active sprints" view the message "There are no active sprints." is displayed.

Theory: I think some stories were placed into sprints on one team's board and then moved to the other team's board, duplicating the same sprint ID across boards.  Sprint handling has caused problems on several occasions.  Most of the time in the UI, Sprint is treated as part of a Board, but the fact that Sprint is really just metadata on the issue allows for things to really get messed up.

Brendon Thiede · Answer

JIRA Agile does create a new Sprint ID if you create the sprint on a new board, but if an issue is assigned to a sprint on one board and then changed such that it now appears on a different board, the same sprint ID now shows up for two different boards.  If you rename the sprint on one board's backlog, the same name appears on the other board too.  I'm still trying to recreate the scenario where you end up with the errors reported, but I did create a scenario (in a test instance with fresh, standard projects) where I had a sprint copied across boards, but now one board no longer has any issues in the sprint, l but it can't start another sprint:
1) in project "Herp", board "Herp", create "Sprint 9000"
2) add some issues to "Herp" -> "Sprint 9000"
3) move some of the issues (not all of them) to the "Derp" project, which has board "Derp"
4) switch to board "Derp" and start "Sprint 9000"
5) switch back to board "Herp" and create "Sprint 9001"
6) move all issues on the "Herp" board from "Sprint 9000" to "Sprint 9001"

You cannot start "Sprint 9001" unless "Sprint 9000" is closed.  This is essentially the state that the teams' boards were in, except the UI presented the option to "Start Sprint" and only complained after you chose dates and tried to continue.

Elizabeth Akagla · Answer

Hello Brendon,

This is what I have heuristically found. JIRA assigns a new sprint number to a different board, even if the name is the same. The solution I use is to have one Ecosystem board that is used to create the sprints and to start the sprint. Another side effect is that the sprint name will not appear in the related boards. You will need to manually assign one issue to the sprint name created from the Ecosystem board for the issue and the sprint to appear on a related board.

If anyone has a more optimal solution, it would be good to know.

Best.