How to see past sprints for details on creating release notes

[Colton Carnevale]

Hey everyone,

We just completed our first sprint, and I was quite surprised that everything disappeared after finishing it. I'm used to GitHub's functions that always allow you to view closed items to refer back to.

I'm curious as to how I am supposed to write up release notes once the sprint is finalized. You never know what will be in the release until the sprint is closed, so there's no way to create it before. In practice, I understand you shouldn't modify sprints, but in the real world deadlines aren't always met and things are sometimes pushed to the next sprint. 

I found a really bad report under "reports", but our setup is using next-gen software so reports weren't even an option at first. 

There's got to be a better way to review past sprints to review what was done.

Thanks in advance. 

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Colton Carnevale 

Welcome to the community.

You can review the contents of a sprint in multiple ways:

1. Go to the Advanced Search screen and execute a search for all issues where

Sprint=<your sprint> and StatusCategory=Done

2. Go to the Reports section for the board where you managed the sprint and review the Sprint Burndown (for Team Managed/next-gen projects).

And alternative to reviewing the sprints is to use the Releases functionality. Use it to define a release/version entity for your next release. As you transition your issues to Done, enter that value into the Fix Version field for the issue. Then you can look at the Releases and see the issues that have been associated to a given by virtue of that value being in the Fix Version field of the issues.

Releases is another Feature that you have to enable under Project Settings > Features for a Team Managed/next-gen project.

[Colton Carnevale]

Okay thanks so much! The advanced search option is what I am looking for I believe.

On another note, I read some documentation showing that issues can belong to multiple sprints, but I see no ability to add to multiple. It seems like an issue can only belong to 1 sprint, which makes sense. 

[Trudy Claspill]

If an issue is not completed in one sprint, it can be added to another sprint where the work will be continued. In that way, and issue can have more than one value in its Sprint field.

When you complete a sprint if you have any incomplete issues in it you will be prompted to move the issues to another sprint or to the backlog. It is through that process that they may be added to a second sprint. Or if you elect to move the incomplete issues to the Backlog, then they will be added to another sprint when you do that through backlog grooming.

An issue cannot belong to two Active sprints at the same time, though.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Colton Carnevale -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Here are some questions to help the community offer ideas:

1. You describe using scrum, correct?
2. Are you doing a release with each sprint?
3. Are you using any DevOps/pipeline tools integration with Jira?

If at least #1 and #2 of those things match your use case, you could try using the built-in release management and automation for Jira features.  For example:

• create one automation rule, triggered on sprint start, which creates a Jira version (release)
• create another automation rule, triggered on an issue transitioning to "done" to add it to the Jira version
• create one more automation rule, triggered on sprint completion, which "releases" the Jira version.  From this rule, you could also send a communication about the release contents.

And you may navigate to the release list to create the notes outside of automation, if you wish.

Here are some references to get you started if that approach seems helpful:

• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/enable-releases-and-versions/
• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-release-notes/
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/expand-jira/automation
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Automation-articles/Jira-Automation-all-the-resources-you-need-in-one-page/ba-p/1388465
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/label/all/1453

Best regards,

Bill