creating empty sprints for planning

Simon Phillips November 20, 2020

Hi

Does anyone know of a way to create empty sprints so we can plan out sprints for the year - i.e. we create sprints with start and finish dates, for the whole year and then in planning we can simply add in the items to the relevant sprints throughout the year?

Thanks

2 answers

1 accepted

0 votes
Answer accepted
Walter Buggenhout
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2020

Hi @Simon Phillips,

You can add as many (empty) sprints  as you like. You cannot set the dates up front, as they are filled out when you start the sprint.

But that should not keep you from creating a couple right away.

(just click the Create Sprint button a couple of times)

Simon Phillips November 20, 2020

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

I understand but we wanted to use the dates to help highlight when each sprint starts and ends.  This will help the PO/business see our sprint cycle.

Simon

Walter Buggenhout
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2020

I understand, but you can't initiate those up front. As a workaround, you could simply reference them in your sprint names, though.

Simon Phillips November 20, 2020

True, it just would be nice to be able to plan the year, especially around known periods of non-work - i.e. public holidays etc.

Simon Phillips November 20, 2020

It would also be good to understand how you can represent vacation of a team member in a sprint.

Walter Buggenhout
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2020

Sure,

Just be aware that the more sprints you create up front, the more hassle it will be to assign issues from the backlog into the correct sprint. In sprint planning, that will usually be the next sprint (maybe 2 or 3 maximum ahead of time).

And I know from experience that no living being is capable of correctly planning the allocation of work to the correct sprints up front for several months correctly. That will mean you'd be dragging work across sprints all of the time.

In the end, in terms of effective work management I'd dare to suggest not creating more than like 2 or 3 sprints ahead of time will often prove to be most effective in terms of organising your work. 

Like # people like this
Walter Buggenhout
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2020

About the vacation part: the tool does not support you there. The sprint is a commitment of the set of issues you commit to as a team for a certain time box (of usually just a couple of weeks, right).

The tool is there to visualise the result of your underlying sprint planning process, where you sit together as a team and decide what the amount of work you are going to undertake during that time box. In that meeting, you take the capacity of your team (and as such also holidays) into account to decide what work will be committed. And it is the result of that exercise that ends up in your sprint.

You are right that it may be added value to include this capacity information into Jira to support your overall process. The Atlassian Marketplace offers quite a few apps that may support that capacity use case 

Like Simon Phillips likes this
Jack Brickey
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 20, 2020

personally I would do this outside of Jira. I can imagine planning an entire year out would inevitably result in constant change. as each sprint approaches you can then use the external reference to build the upcoming sprint. Alternatively, maybe your create a dummy scrum board for planning then clean things up as you move the issues into the actual execution scrum board. just a crazy idea. :-)

Like # people like this
0 votes
Nicole Martinez October 14, 2021

It is possible to add the dates into the future Sprints you create by clicking the three dots.. it will show up in the Backlog view.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
DEPLOYMENT TYPE
CLOUD
PRODUCT PLAN
STANDARD
PERMISSIONS LEVEL
Site Admin
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events