GreenHopper: Complete sprint without moving incomplete stories to backlog?

[Shaun Dishman]

Hi everyone,

Here is our situation. Our JIRA workflow tracks our issues from inception to completion, including both development/QA/deployment time. We use GreenHopper sprints mainly to track work through the development pipeline, and it works great for that.

At the end of a sprint, if I have a issue that we just ran out of time to get to, then I definitely want to punt that one back to the backlog (or ahead to the next sprint). However, my question is about the rest of the stories, which might be development complete but are in a status of "QA". When I try to complete the sprint, it considers all these stories as "incomplete" and wants to move them back to the backlog, which I definitely don't want to do. We don't really rely on the Agile board for our QA process, so moving them ahead to the next sprint would just result in noise, and obviously I don't want them back on the backlog, either.

It seems to me that the key is in how GreenHopper defines a story as "incomplete". What would be ideal is if there was a way to define incompleteness - by a status or set of statuses, for example. Does anyone know if this is possible? Even if I could just turn off the feature that moves stories to the backlog automatically, that would be fine too. I don't mind manually having to move those that are truly incomplete.

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

Check Administration -> GreenHopper -> Project Templates. In Task Board Mapping you can set "QA" as one of the statuses that puts the issue in "Done".

I'm not sure if this is really what you want, but from the instructions in the configuration view it seems like this is the only way to do it:

Important: The Task Board column "DONE" is the owner of your Projects "Definition of Done". GreenHopper will rely on this definition to burn your values (hours, issues) in the charts and to swap issues upon the release of a version.

[Shaun Dishman]

Thank you. Though it may seem obvious, I did not realize that the "Done" column actually defined the "definition of Done". I just assumed it was yet another named column of no particular significance.

Though I didn't actually change the "Done" column in Project Templates, instead I changed it for my actual board. However, I guess they do just about the same thing, the only difference being the Project Templates change would adjust it for all future boards I might create.

[James Strangeway]

If you have your next sprint created, it should automatically move them to your next sprint if they are not "done". So you could make sure you have your next sprint created before closing/ending the current sprint.