Shifting stories between teams in a large Scrum project not possible?

[Nicole Neunhoeffer]

We are currently evaluating if and how to use Portfolio for JIRA for managing Scrum projects with multiple teams. In our exemplary setup, we have 3 different teams, each of them with their own board, and a portfolio plan integrating the 3 projects' boards. All 3 teams are supposed to work in parallel sprints and produce a common product increment.

The scenario I am struggling with is as follows:

In order to use the available capacity ideally, I am shifting a story from Team A's sprint 1 to Team B's sprint 1 in Portfolio. This is correctly displayed in the schedule view. I navigate to Team B's board and start sprint 1. The shifted story from Team A is not visible, only the stories originally assigned to Team B. A warning message explains there is 1 hidden issue in this sprint. Fair enough.

The problem happens in Team A's board. By having started Team B's sprint (that includes a story from Team A's board), there is already an active sprint in Team A's backlog (called Team B's sprint 1). This implies I cannot start the sprint 1 planned for Team A.

All I wanted to do is have A and B work in parallel and B take over a story from A because they have the capacity.

Can anyone help explain what I am doing wrong? Or does the available functionality not support my use case? Please advise.

Thanks & Regards, Nicole

[Allard van Helbergen · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nicole Neunhoeffer,

The confusion you're experiencing seems to be with the way Jira handles this functionality, rather than anything going wrong.

I'm going to assume that the boards for each team each have their own backlog and isn't shared, e.g. different projects? This means that each board has it's own filter, thus an issue from one board could never show on another teams board, because the story wouldn't be included in the filter. 

The story that you shifted from team A to B is still on team A's board because of the above. It is however assigned to team B's sprint which is why that sprint shows up on team A's board. 

First off, you should be free to start Team A's sprint on their board, regardless of team B's sprint showing up there due to the shifted story. Teh two sprints shouldn't interfere with each other.

Secondly, to help clarify the situation you could move the shifted story from team A's project to team B's project. This would take it off team A's board and put it on team B's. 

Cheers,
Allard

[Nicole Neunhoeffer]

Hi Allard,

thanks a lot for your response, much appreciated.

Unfortunately, the two sprints do interfere with each other and I am not able to start Team A's "own" sprint as long as Team B's sprint is active. Not sure if this is supposed to be like that.

Moving the issue to Team B's project worked fine, thanks for the hint. Afterwards, I could also start Team A's sprint as planned as there was no active sprint anymore.

Thanks again & best regards,

Nicole

[Allard van Helbergen]

Glad it helped and solved your problem!

In case you run into the situation where you want to have multiple sprints active on the same board again, have a look at the following page. I'm thinking this may be why you weren't able to start both sprints. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/using-parallel-sprints-797737030.html

Cheers,
Allard

[Nicole Neunhoeffer]

Exactly, enabling parallel sprints in JIRA administration did the trick!

Many thanks for your support on the matter, much appreciated.

Best regards,

Nicole