Why does moving an issue between projects associate the sprint from the old project with the new one

[Berin Loritsch]

I use Jira 8.5.5 hosted by Di2E, and I have a major problem with the way sprints are handled when moving issues between projects.  I manage multiple product lines, and occasionally there are tickets that are entered in on the wrong board.

The problem is that if the Jira issue is already assigned to a sprint, that sprint that was for Project A is now also associated with Project B.  There is no way to disassociate it from the wrong project board without causing unintentional harm.  When the same sprint is associated with two projects the following are true:

• Changing the sprint name on one board changes it on the other board
• Deleting the sprint deletes it on both boards and all the associated issues are moved to the next sprint (or backlog)
• Starting the sprint on one board starts it on the other

The major issue is that I never wanted that sprint to be associated with the other project.  Each project has it's own release trains and numbering.  The only way to fix the issue I know of is the following procedure:

• Create a new sprint on the origin board
• Move all the issues from the original sprint to the new one (and the sprint goal as well)
• Move all the issues from the destination board to the correct sprint or backlog
• Delete the duplicate sprint (affects both boards)

If multiple people are working the backlog, and new issues get assigned to the erroneous sprint, we have to create 2 new sprints and move the issues on each board to fix the problem.

QUESTION 1:

Is there any non-destructive way to remove a sprint association from a project's board?  Barring that, can "Delete Sprint" be redefined to remove the sprint association with a project and on the last association actually delete the sprint?

The current behavior is confusing, introduces too many opportunities to unintentionally screw up another project's backlog.

QUESTION 2:

When moving an issue between projects, can we please strip the associated sprint that should ONLY belong to one project?

This is the real problem here.  It's surprising behavior, and it is the only way I know of to get into a situation where the same Sprint object is associated with boards for two separate projects.  It should be considered a bug.

[Ryan Gill]

Hello everyone, I see there have been a lot of workarounds involving modifying the offending issue or reopening and closing the sprint, which is not always possible or straightforward since it may involve another team's closed sprint, and you could break another team's velocity chart or sprint history in order to fix your own. 

Instead of trying to fix the offending issue and sprint, I flipped my logic to fixing my board. 

I reconfigured my agile board's filter to exclude the sprint values which came from another project, here is an example:

(project = X AND Sprint not in (1234)) OR (project = X AND Sprint is EMPTY) ORDER BY Rank ASC

The first section of the filter before the OR statement searches for all issues in sprints except for the one that I want to exclude.

The second section includes the backlog. 

I hope this helps, as this issue is incredibly frustrating! Hopefully Atlassian can fix this bug soon so that we don't need to keep inventing new workarounds when they stop working!

[Ivan Lima]

Hey @Berin Loritsch, if you hadn't had a chance to browse similar questions to yours in the community, I will be sharing a few of them for your reference. Therefore, in short, this scenario is a known "issue" raised as a suggestion at JSWSERVER-11992. You can vote for it to be considered in features releases and add yourself as a watcher to receive updates moving forward.

That said, have a look at the following knowledgebase articles that should address the main points of your questions since it is the current JIRA Agile behaviour - although it's not quite intuitive for end-users as stated in the article.

• The same sprint is displayed across different scrum boards after moving an issue
• Sprints appearing on multiple boards in Jira server

Also, have a look at other similar questions that may provide you with additional insights

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Sprints-undesirably-shared-over-projects/qaq-p/1312162
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-can-I-prevent-projects-from-sharing-sprint-access-when/qaq-p/1040113

I hope that helps,
IL.