Using manage sprints permission

[Phil Hayes]

Hi All,

I'm struggling to find out whats wrong with some permissions that I have created.

Basically, I wanted to give all our squad leads the ability to manage sprints without giving them full admin access to our Jira instance. I followed this article on the atlassian support pages, but it's still not working.

There's probably a bit of background that needs to go with this post too, as we run things a little differently, please bear with me:

1. We have 9 squads, and each of these squads have their own boards. When a new project is created we use the category in project settings to allocate a squad to the project
2. We then use a JQL filter on the squad board to pull in the issues from the new project based on the project using that category. The JQL is very basic

category = "Squad 1" ORDER BY Rank ASC

This allows us to manage multiple projects for a single squad in 1 board

The issue I'm having is that even though I've given our squad leads the Manage Sprint permission following the article referenced above, the Create Sprint and ability to start a sprint is still greyed out for them

Has anyone come across this previously? 

*** Edit *** 

I've noticed that when trying to create or start a sprint this dialogue is present

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Phil Hayes 

Modify your JQL and limit it to those project.

Do you have 9 squad boards and 1 common board for everyone? In any case specifying the projects in the board filter's JQL should work.

Ravi

[Phil Hayes]

Hi @Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ 

I was trying to avoid having to update the JQL each time we add a project, hence using the categories to in essence automatically add them

I have 9 squad boards, each of them setup in the same way. I don't have 1 common board that sows everything, that would be information overload

[Trudy Claspill]

You must explicitly declare the in scope projects in the JQL filter. You can't use criteria to select the projects (i.e. using the project category.)

Otherwise Jira will assume that any and all projects may have issues that are within the scope of the board, and the users must then have Manage Sprint permissions for all projects on the Jira instance. 

[Phil Hayes]

I'm guessing that this is the issue I'm having, trying to minimise the overhead of constantly updating the JQL by using categories, but even though the JQL is simple there's too much for Jira to work out

[Matt Doar]

I find debugging sprint permissions can get tricky, even for experienced Jira admins. One approach I sometime use is to start with a new board to see if I can reproduce it using the smallest possible configuration. Though I think your current board seems pretty simple already. If the problem were just for Closing sprints, then there are a bunch of other possible reasons such as an issue being moved out of the scope of the board filter.

Still, a new board in staging with just a few issues and one of the users creating new sprint is a good data point

[Rilwan Ahmed]

Hi @Phil Hayes ,

"Start Sprint" will be available only when there are no active sprints. Please check if there are any active sprints in your board. 

[Phil Hayes]

Thanks for your input, I've been a Jira admin for a long time so I know the reasons around not being able to start a sprint etc., but that doesn't explain why I can't create a sprint even with what looks like the correct permissions applied according to the article

[Marta Woźniak-Semeniuk]

Do the squad leads have "Manage Sprints" permission in all projects that are included in the board query?

[Phil Hayes]

Yes, we only use the default project permission set

I've double checked and all the projects have the "Sprint Manager" group added under the Manage Sprint permission

[Rilwan Ahmed]

Hi @Phil Hayes ,

1. Please check if you have manage sprints in all projects which are present in the board

2. Check the Board filter and see if you have permissions to all tickets/projects used in the filter/JQL. 
i.e. You should have manage sprint in all projects under category Squad 1. 

[Phil Hayes]

All checked already, there are only 3 projects for this squad at the moment

1. each of the projects has the same default software permissions as the squad board
2. The JQL access is set for my organisation
3. I've checked that users can create, start and finish sprints on the individual project boards, and this is possible

It's just the squad board that seems to be the issue for some unknown reason

[Rilwan Ahmed]

Hi @Phil Hayes 

Sprint Manager is a group or a project role ? 

Can you please share the permission scheme and board setting screenshots

[Phil Hayes]

It's both

The screenshot below is the group to manager the users who are are granted the permission - this group is the only member of the Project Role

This is the project role which has the above group as it's member to grant the permission

Note: I have also tried adding users to this Project Role individually, rather than using a group but this had the same results

This is the Default software scheme we use on all our projects

[Rilwan Ahmed]

Did you add required user into Project role --> Sprint managers ?

i.e. Go to project settings --> People
Select Spring manager in the roles and see if the user is added there or not.
Check in all projects which belongs to category "Squad 1"

[Phil Hayes]

As mentioned I added a user group (Sprint Manger) in to the Project role as a default group member, this group has all my engineering managers in that group

This is the same as adding them individually - adding them individually doesn't do anything either