Is it possible to automate the closing of a Sprint?

[Misty Meyers]

Good afternoon!

I hope everyone is faring as well as can be.  I have a feeling the answer to my question will be "no," but here is the background behind it.

We have a project in which we are struggling to get project participants to fully adopt the Agile process (what goes into a Sprint must be completed in a Sprint).  We are tasked with reporting up and the work completed on a weekly basis and have advised our team, that should an issue that is in the sprint not be moved to "Done" by the end of the sprint, it is to be cloned and moved to the backlog, work completed to date recorded on the original issue and then progress to "Done."

This process is designed to work around the reporting issue created when closing a sprint and moving unresolved items to the next sprint, where the item then has two Sprints associated. Convoluted, I agree, but it keeps us from counting a story point value for the same item multiple times. 

Thoughts?  Process suggestions?

Appreciate all!

Misty

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Misty Meyers 

Tell us more about your statement "counting a story point value for the same item multiple times". How do you figure you're counting the story points multiple times when incomplete issues are moved to the next sprint?

Also, clarify what you are trying to automate when you say "automate the closing of a sprint". Are you looking for a way to automate the cloning of the issues (the process you described)?

Personally, I would be inclined to recommend not cloning the issues and simply move the incomplete items to the next sprint. The team does not get "credit" for partially completed work in the sprint being closed. This illuminates the problem of improper scoping of work and capacity for the team, and motivates the team to fix the underlying issue rather than accommodating their resistance to adopting agile/scrum methodologies.

[Misty Meyers]

Hi Trudy,

Thank you for your response.  Our  Sprint "reporting" is manual. We are a small US team which reports to leadership in Japan, who aren't keen on any tool beyond Excel.  We are tasked with reporting the hours (I referred to points in error above) worked for all issues on a weekly basis.  As you may have guessed, many of the Agile processes are not applied here. Since we have struggles with process compliance, I was trying to find a way to take care of our request via automation.

When I say "automate closing a Sprint" I am referring to having Jira close it automatically based upon the End Date set on the Sprint.  Possible?

I agree with you. Even better would be to be more fully Agile where the work is groomed into smaller increments that could be estimated properly, assigned and completed within a single sprint! For now.. this is my team's hybrid version of the process.  Thus far it works, with a little bit of manual tedium!

Thank you!

[Trudy Claspill]

@Misty Meyers 

Based on this post from July, it does not look like Automation for JIRA has a feature to support this.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Automatic-Sprint-Completion-and-Creation/qaq-p/1439088

The post also provides a link to a change request to add that feature.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-20563

I think the only way you might be able to automate closing the sprint would be to write your own code to use the REST API to find the sprints that should be closed and then close them. The API does have an end point for completing a sprint, but according to this issue that endpoint does not include a way to specify what to do with incomplete issues.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-16588

[Misty Meyers]

Thank you!

Happy Holidays!

[Jussi Niutanen]

Hi,

I did Python script for this https://github.com/JussiNiutanen/JiraPython

I hope this helps. 

Best,

Jussi

[Jerry Laster _Divim_ Inc__]

Hi,

We just released Sprint automation for Jira to automate the closing and start of sprints. Please check it out at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/1225720.

Try it free for one month, and please give us feedback about features, functionality, and pricing. 

Happy to support the community!

Jerry