Mass cloning stories

[jeffrey_kent]

My work is broken into 3 week sprints. My stories are all title "[task title] YYQQSS" e.g. "R&D Support for Knee 24Q2S2". At the end of the sprint, about half of the stories continue into the next sprint. On the last day, I click each story, click clone, update the YYQQSS to the next sprint, then go to the next story and do the same. It's slow and time-consuming. Is there a faster way for me to perform a mass-action and clone all open stories? And can I perform a similar title change to all of them?

Note: I have the YYQQSS in the title because when I export to excel some of them have multiple "sprint" values so it breaks my macro. This was the simplest solution.

[Clara Belin-Brosseau]

Hello @jeffrey_kent

If you're seeking for an easy way to bulk clone stories, you can try our app Elements Copy & Sync that allows you to clone issues with all their content (summary, description, custom fields, comments, attachments, etc.) and their child issues.

You’ll be able to bulk clone your stories and define the summaries of your clones

Don't hesitate to try our app, it's free during 30 days and stays free under 10 users.

Kind regards,
Clara

[Luka Hummel - codefortynine]

Hi @jeffrey_kent and welcome to the community!

If you are willing to use a third-party app, our Deep Clone for Jira can help reduce the amount of manual work you will have to do cloning the remaining issues of each sprint.

1. You can use our Bulk Clone feature and use the JQL Sprint = XXX AND resolved IS EMPTY (Where XXX is your completed sprint) to fetch all the remaining issues of your completed sprint.
2. When configuring the clone, you can use the Field Editor feature to replace YYQQSS in your summary with the new sprints code.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @jeffrey_kent -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

If the user stories are incomplete in the sprint, and continuing work in the next sprint, why not just add them to the next sprint?  

What is the purpose of cloning the issues? 

What happens to the incomplete issues in the current sprint?  For example, if they are marked as "done" it will make the sprint data reporting in Jira incorrect.

Kind regards,
Bill

[jeffrey_kent]

Hey Bill, thanks!

It depends on the story. Some are continued due to hiccups and poor planning. Others are recurring stories so it's simpler to clone them, and this helps us look back to see trends. E.g. if I budget 30 hours per sprint to review documents for Team A, I can see how accurate the planning for each individual sprint was.

For non-recurring stories, sometimes we plan for 10 hours in one sprint (for example), but it ends up taking 5 hours, 6 hours, 5 hour, and 7 hours across four sprints. I want to see a) how much time did I spend this sprint on that story and b) how much in total. In this case, the time spent on the story in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th sprint were all unplanned. I want to see how much of my time was spent on unplanned things vs planned things in that sprint and I want to see how long that story took vs the initial plan.

Having both the single-sprint data and the link to collect the total data for stories has value for us to improve our planning.

[Bill Sheboy]

For the recurring stories, you may want to use a manually-triggered automation rule to create them.  That could be run before / during sprint planning to have them ready before the sprint starts.

For the stories that carry-over, perhaps discuss with the team at the retro for each one to see what could be learned to improve backlog refinement and planning.  When they do carry over, each end of sprint report (or burn charts) could be used to assess the additional work.

If you want to try creating an automation rule for the recurring stories, here is some information to get you started:

• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/automation/overview#what-is-automation
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library#/rule-list?systemLabelId=all&page=1&pageSize=20&sortKey=name&sortOrder=ASC
• https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/
• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/use-advanced-search-with-jira-query-language-jql/