Sprint Naming Convention

[Melanie Pinter]

This is our first year so it's a basic question. We've been naming our sprints Sprint 1 2018, Sprint 2 2018, etc with the corresponding start/end dates. For those of you that also do it this way, do you start over at 1 or continue increasing the count by one for each sprint (someday getting to large numbers)? 

[Kat Warner · Accepted solution]

We use the naming convention '2018 Sprint 45' for weekly sprints. In a couple of months time we will have sprint '2018 Sprint 52' followed by '2019 Sprint 1'.

Putting the year first means the auto-complete lists are in time order otherwise in 2025 you will see:

• Sprint 1 2018
• Sprint 1 2019
• Sprint 1 2020
• Sprint 2 2018

Rather than:

• 2018 Sprint 1
• 2018 Sprint 2
• ...
• 2019 Sprint 1
• ...
• 2020 Sprint 1

[Kat Warner]

I have something else important to add I learnt the hard way this year. For the first 9 weeks of the year use 01, 02, etc with the leading zero. The fixVersion dropdown sorts alphanumerically and will not play nicely for the time both single and double digit weeks are open.

[Ashok_Chandrasekaran]

When creating a new Sprint using Greenhopper (6.0.3) the names automatically increment, for example if the last existing sprint is called "Sprint 6", the system will already create "Sprint 7". This works for any string or string/number combination - and the last number is always the only one incremented.

I want to create a naming convention where two numbers are incremented, for example if the previous sprint is called "Sprint 43-44" I want to increment both numbers so the next sprint created will automatically be named "Sprint 45-46". The requirement is to increment more than one number, and to increment by more than 1.

Does anyone have any experience with this update to the naming convention? I have gone through the JIRA answers, and other Q/A sources like stackoverflow but have found nothing so far.

Many thanks in advance

[Scott Thurston]

Once you create a sprint you can edit it to change the name to anything you want.

[Kirk Gould]

Strong Naming Convention:

One thing to consider is of course the year, but remember that many Teams are creating their own Sprints and Jira can allow you to accidentally pick the Sprint of someone else's sprint.  I don't want to go into the heartbreak that that can cause, but let's talk about a solution that can help avoid that and that works for many situations.  Let's come up with a Sprint Naming convention that is concise, non-confusing, date self evident, and usable year after year.

First Start with the Project Name Key (Name Key is unique within a Jira instance)

Next a Space

Next a two digit number that resets every January 1 (first sprint of year is 01, second is 02, etc.)

Next a Period

Next the last two digits of the current year:

• This will work for 1 Week Sprints or 2 Week Sprints
• This will work for different Teams\Projects in Jira
• This will work year in and year out
• This will let people pick the right Sprint from Drop Downs
• This will prevent the chaos that ensues when someone picks the wrong Sprint. (Cross Pollination of Projects involving Sprint Start and Sprint Stop. and Sprint renaming of both Projects...that takes a few hours to fix each time.)

Example:

DIJK 07.21

This is easy to teach, easy to do, easy to understand, easy to read, easy to sort, and eliminates confusion.

[Julien Bras]

Why not inverse digit number and current year ? Like 

DIJK 21.07

It will be easier to use the automated sprint naming ;) 

[Kirk Gould]

That is even better Julien and Jacques! 

Thank you. DIJK 21.07 will work and autoincrement.

Kirk