How to create a sprint in Jira

Jack Wallen shows you how to add sprints to your project in Jira.

Jira is a powerful project management suite of tools that empowers your company to manage projects of all types and sizes. You can work with boards, roadmaps, reports, issues, estimations, code, releases, deployments, dashboards, automation and so much more. Jira offers free and paid plans and has something to improve just about every type of project workflow.

Another feature found in Jira is sprints. For those who don’t know, a sprint is a short period when a scrum team attempts to complete a set amount of work. Sprints are the heart of agile methodologies and can help your teams deliver faster and more reliably.

Sprints can be used in Jira to great success. However, when you’re just learning how to use Jira, adding sprints can be a bit tricky.

Let me show you how it’s done.

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How to enable sprints in Jira

The first thing to do is enable the sprint feature in your Jira account, as it won’t be available by default. Although it’s not quite intuitive, it’s quite easy once you know where to look.

Open your Jira project and, in the left sidebar, click Project Settings (Figure A).

Figure A

In the resulting sidebar (Figure B), click Features.

Figure B

Under Planning, you should see both Backlog and Sprints (Figure C).

Figure C

You must enable both Backlog and Sprints by clicking the associated ON/OFF slider to the ON position. Once you’ve done that, back out of the settings window by clicking Back To Project.

How to add a sprint in Jira

We can now add a sprint into the mix. To do so, click Backlog and, in the resulting window (Figure D), either drag issues from your Backlog section or click Create Issue.

Figure D

Once you’ve added at least one issue, the Start Sprint button will be available (Figure E).

Figure E

You will be prompted to name the sprint, set duration and dates (start and end), and add optional sprint goals (Figure F).

Figure F

Once you’ve configured the sprint, click Start and your team is ready to go to work on the issue at hand.

And that is how you create a sprint in Jira. Although it might not be the most intuitive, once you’ve enabled the necessary features, which is done on a per-project basis, creating and managing your sprints is actually quite simple.

Happy sprinting!

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