"Ghost" sprint is appearing on active sprint board and I cannot delete it

[Dean Del Ponte]

We have a sprint appearing in our active sprint board which does not exist, contains no issues, and I cannot complete or delete it.

I tried completing the sprint so I could delete it, but clicking "complete sprint" results in the error "Sprint does not exist".

I know it doesn't exist, so why is it showing up? :)

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello Dean,

Can you execute a search for issues that have their Sprint field set to that sprint?

I would guess that some issue in your board somehow got that sprint value assigned to it. If the sprint really doesn't exist, perhaps there was an error elsewhere in the system and an issue in your board assigned to that sprint did not get its Sprint field cleared.

[Dean Del Ponte]

Thank-you very much for your response!

There were issues assigned that a sprint with the same name... yeah!

I removed all issues from that sprint and I am still unable to close the sprint... same error... boo

[Trudy Claspill]

I had problems like that with JIRA Server (on premise). Since sprint names can be duplicated it can be hard to troubleshoot these issues. The sprint probably belongs to another board/projects in which you don't have Manage Sprint permissions.

In JIRA Server we were able to do database queries to find out to which board a sprint belonged. I'm not aware of a way to do that through the UI or API. You may need to consult with Atlassian Support to trace that sprint to the related board.

In my former JIRA Server environment, we advised the users that best practice for naming sprints included giving them unique identifiers in their names, like the team name or project name. We initially had lots of problems with multiple teams using multiple boards all naming their sprints simply, like Sprint 1, Sprint 2, Sprint 3, and issues getting assigned to the wrong sprints based on duplicate names. 

[Dean Del Ponte]

Thank-you Truday