Thanks for the reply, @Kevin Frey . You may be right. And my understanding is those correspond to the Gray/Blue/Green color scheme of Issue Types.
UPDATE: Maybe the above is wrong. I just discovered that these 3 (color coded) columns appear to NOT be coupled to the same colors as defined under the specific Statuses. Instead, if I go to:
my Status color assignments do NOT align with the 3 columns of the board. (Why would that be?) So I just dragged them around so that basically anything other than Closed is in a column left of "Done".
Will this help? We'll find out at the end of this week when I have to wrap up another sprint.
And I think that was it. Looks like I solved my own problem. Jira had no problem today completing the sprint, and rolling the incomplete jira forward to a new sprint.
I'm not sure exactly why this worked, but my current theory is the fix I made on the 28th. If I'm right, I'm disappointed this is not documented anywhere, and that Jira essentially leaves me stuck, refusing to properly advance the jira to a new sprint, and does not provide a meaningful explanation about why it's not working.
Still, I'm only cautiously optimistic this is the answer. In two week, I will try it again.
1) An earlier sprint, I tried to preserve sprint history by dragging jira on the backlog page from the sprint that was ending to the new one starting up. I was hoping this would have better behavior than using the bulk edit feature, but I believe it was the same: the old sprint was REMOVED in favor of the new one, rather than maintaining a multi-valued history.
2) the only way to preserve the sprint history that I have seen is to "Complete Sprint" using the button on the Active Sprints page.
Speaking of which, (2) worked this time for me again. The "Columns" definition is key. Otherwise, Jira doesn't not understand what is "done" and "not done".
I'm not an expert in either agile nor Jira, but it seems to me that one of the fundamental principles of agile development is Learning and that all agile-related tools should fully support Adjustments beginning to end.
So, the expectation, from a tool's perspective, should be "it didn't happen as was planned". Then, it should fully support adjustments from which Leaning can happen.
I'm probably being too vague, but I feel like I shouldn't have had to go to a special place simply to find out if what will happen to unfinished issues when I click "Complete Sprint".
Thanks to all your comments. For now, I'm just gonna click it and see what happens :)
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