Create a sprint

A sprint is an incremental delivery cycle, usually spanning from one to four weeks. Every sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting. At the end of the sprint, there is a sprint review meeting, followed by a sprint retrospective meeting.

If a sprint is locked and in progress, only a Scrum Master, product owner, and team coach can make changes to it. If a sprint is complete, then only a team coach can make changes to it.

Sprints will start automatically at 11:59 PM on its first day and end automatically at 11:59 PM on its last day if the Start and End Sprint Automatically team platform setting is enabled. It is especially useful for modern Agile teams that aren't using Scrum ceremonies and don't want to spend time on events that will happen anyway. With the option disabled, sprints will start only by a user’s action.

With different reports in Jira Align, you can track the progress of your sprints, view sprint metrics, conduct a survey, and more.

Create sprints from any page with the Create button in the top navigation bar. Alternatively, create sprints from the sprints page:

1. Select Teams in the top navigation bar and select the team you want to create a sprint for.
2. On the sidebar, select More items in the list of options.
3. Select Sprints; the sprints page displays.

To add a sprint:

1. On the sprints page, select the Add Sprint button in the upper-right. The New Sprint slide-out panel displays.
2. Enter the Sprint Name and the Short Name in the appropriate fields.
3. Type a description for the sprint in the Description field.
4. Select the Program Increment, Program, and Team from the corresponding drop-down menus.
5. Next, select the Start and End Dates, and the Sync Date of the sprint in the corresponding fields.
6. Type the sprint's goal in the Goal box.
7. The remaining fields are optional and can be filled out as needed, then click Save to add the sprint to the Sprints grid:

• Owner: the owner of the sprint.
• Schedule: the number of week days in the sprint.
• State: the current state of the sprint, such as not started or completed.
• Region: the geographic region tied to the sprint.
• Regression: text field for describing what you need to regress in a sprint.
• Type: the type of sprint, such as standard or innovation and planning (IP). Note that type is a visual designation and does not affect calculations such as velocity. 
• Burn Hours: daily maximum of hours expected for sprint points.
• Defect Hours: daily maximum of hours allotted for defect fixing in the sprint.
• Report Color: select a color that will represent the sprint on reports.
• Avg Velocity: this field is read-only and reflects the average measure of the amount of work a team can tackle during a single sprint, based on the team’s velocity during the last five completed sprints.
• Velocity Override: If you expect a team’s velocity in an individual sprint will be much higher or lower than average, use this field to reflect the expected velocity for planning purposes. This number will display as the Average Velocity on the Backlog and other pages until the sprint is completed. Using this field does not affect the information displayed in the Avg Velocity field.
• Meeting Logistics: a free-form field to describe any important details about the sprint meetings.

Team members, their roles and allocations are copied to each team’s sprint. Any changes—a member added or deleted, or allocations changed—will update all sprints that are not in the In Development or Completed state. These changes will apply only to sprints with default settings and not the ones that were changed manually on a sprint level. Likewise, any changes made to a sprint will update the team.

Team members that have allocations in other sprints will have an information icon next to their name. Click this icon to view detailed allocations the users have for all teams and sprints.

Users who were not previously part of the sprint will be added to the sprint and team with 0% allocation when they log time against a task. This will also occur when task time is synced through the Jira connector, if the Settings > Jira Settings > Jira Setup > Allow Jira to add users to teams if they belong to an issue setting is set to Yes.

You can manually change the sprint’s member details on the Members tab by adding or removing members, updating their roles, and updating their allocations. Additionally, you can copy all members from this team into a sprint or copy a prior sprint’s team members and allocations into this sprint to default the changes you may have made. These two options are unavailable for sprints that are in the In Development or Completed state unless you deselect all users from the sprint.