What are external sprints in your plan?

If you use projects or filters as your issue sources, sprint assignments of the included issues will still show on your plan. However, since sprint data is based on boards,your plan will add the EXTERNAL lozenge to indicate that these sprints are not directly associated with the project and filter issue sources.

You can update the sprint values of the issues assigned to these external sprints. However, you can’t assign new issues in your plan to an external sprint.

To avoid creating external sprints, we recommend that you use boards as issue sources where possible as sprints are conceptually tied to boards. Issues imported from projects and filters may comprise multiple boards (and therefore sprints) which will show on your timeline as external sprints.

Troubleshoot external sprints

There are two main reasons you may see external sprints on your plan:

1. One of your future sprints appears on another Scrum board

2. One of the teams for which you’re planning future sprints has a different iteration length configured

If either of these are true, and you use Group issues by team and Show capacity on the timeline, the common sprint will occur at different times in each team’s swimlane. To compensate for this inconsistency in planning, your plan will automatically create an external sprint because the same sprint can’t have two different start and end dates.

This issue will resolve itself once a future sprint becomes an active one.