How do I create multiple sprints for one project in Greenhopper?

Laura Gill August 19, 2012

Our dev team works out of one project in JIRA for two different business units. Is there a way to create two active sprints in Greenhopper?

I was able to setup one sprint without any problem, however whenI try to set up a second one which starts/ends at the same time, I'm automatically served with a "Upcomming Sprint" UI and can not select any dates.

4 answers

3 votes
Stuart Bargon June 4, 2013
1 vote
a a January 21, 2014

Hi,

For those searching for solution to have in JIRA Agile 2 (two) projects defined and wants to have 2 (two) paraller sprints for these projects on 1 (one) board:

1. Please define filter (in board configuration) that contains these two projects which you wanted on one board.

2. Then go back to the board (you should see issues from these two projects in your backlog),define sprint contains issues from one of them.

3. Start this new sprint.

4. Define another sprint with another name (for distinction), that contains issues from second project. After that, try to start this second sprint and you'll see "you can't start this new sprint until above sprint will be finished" JIRA says.!

But....

5. Go to defining filter again (as in pt.1 above), and exclude project within which the sprint you already started in pt.3

6. Then go to scrum board (plan mode) again, and start this new sprint defined in pt.4. Now sprint STARTS without yelling.

7. Then again do pt.1 (include your two projects)

And finally...

8.Go to the scrum board and ... TADAM! magically you have two sprints running parallely. Including plan mode, work mode, and report mode.

In plan mode you can choose one sprint to display issues from itself, or second, or both of them at once.

This works probably for X of sprints, based on X projects, but I did not try this.

Hope this helps

Good luck with your projects

Thank you

Andy

ps. If you had finished one of the sprints and again can't start second sprint. Do the magic from pt. 5 to 8, having in mind to exclude from filter in step one the project which is running current sprint.

1 vote
Gagandeep Walia June 3, 2013

Apparently, the syntax is sprint is empty, not sprint = empty. That worked for me.

This whole set up is really confusing.

1 vote
Thiago Ribeiro
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
August 19, 2012

Hi Laura,

This question was previously answered here:

Start Multiple Sprints Simultaneously

You can have multiple sprints running at once, you just cannot start a new Sprint on a board that contains issues that are already in a Sprint.

The key is that the issues that are selected by the filter for the rapid board must not select issues that are already in a Sprint. So for example, a Rapid Board that selected only issues in project X would be completely independent of a Rapid Board that selected project Y. You could achieve the same with Rapid Boards that selected different components from the same project, different labels or any of a variety of other combinations.

If you want to have two teams drawing from the same backlog you could potentially use the following approach:

  • Have one 'Planning' Rapid Board that selects all of the issues you wish to work with but deliberately filters out those that are in openSprints (for example the JQL might be "project = x and Sprint not in openSprints()". Use this board to plan the Sprints then label each of the issues as for Team A or Team B
  • Have two other 'Work' Rapid Boards, one for each team. These would filter based on the label (for example "project = x and label = Team A")

Also there is a Story regarding to this feature GHS-5410 that I'd advise to vote and add on your watch-list to receive future updates.

I hope it helps you! :)

motherg January 21, 2014

I'll warn you off this approach - we just tried to implement it and it failed completely.

The idea was we'd use components for each project area, each component would then have a board that was filtered to look at just that one.

The issue we found was that the sprints from all the components kept showing up on each others board, regardless of the filter.

I'd say the easiest way to do it is to create multiple projects and manage the backlogs individually - sure, you can have another project which you use for creating all the issues and backlog grooming, you just move the issues to the relevant project afterwards. I don't like this idea, but you could do it.

Or you could use the parrallel sprints feature - only found out about that after we did all the splitting up.

Lee Marvin Ison October 13, 2014

My project was trying to do the same (use different components to split up the sprints) which brought me here. The solution is actually much simpler - just name your sprints differently. If they are both "Sprint 1" then they get treated as one (even though it looks split up due to filtering), so just prefix the name accordingly.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer