Update
The specified history of the GHS-945 was already solved in GreenHopper 5.10 - meanwhile, GreenHopper 6.0 officially provides all the mentioned major improvements regarding Kanban, Scrum and especially customizable flexible boards, scheduling and process control, as well as many others not mentioned or previously available. Accordingly, the interim term Rapid Board was also dropped, see No longer Fast by name - but still fast by nature :
In GreenHopper 6.0, the new board is no longer known as the “Rapid Board" - we all know that it is now much faster than Classic Boards. The new board was built from the ground up with newer technology that allows us to provide optimum performance, making the most of your precious time.
Finally, the GreenHopper team continues to significantly improve almost two-week releases, and the latter concerns one of the few losses caused by the transition from classic boards: release 6.0.2 customizable card colors , even more universal than the classic version, if you can now colorize by problem type, priority, assignee, or custom JQL query.
Conclusion
Our previous workflow, including lag coloring (see What color is your lag? ) Is now fully transferred to the new GreenHopper, gaining a huge amount of significant new features and improvements on the fly and, accordingly, a more flexible and productive team.
Original answer
Mismatch between version impedance versus sprint in many areas of JIRA and GreenHopper is a well-known issue for flexible teams using this toolchain. We have made various attempts to fix this anyway (mainly using version hierarchies, that is, product versions and sprint versions with parent child relationships), none of which turned out to be really productive.
Accordingly, the relatively dated history of Add a separate field that allows you to track information about sprint and release independently of each other (GHS-945) captures this topic. Despite the fact that it has not been resolved to date, GreenHopper is currently undergoing a major restructuring to solve these (and related) problems, and is still not completely finished, the corresponding functionality available today concerns your use case (in the end), see Status Atlassian Status as on February 28, 2012:
Sprint as a separate custom field is now available in GreenHopper 5.9 however it is used only by the Scrum Rapid Board (which can be enabled as a laboratory function from the GreenHopper admin screens).
Using the Rapid Board of this field frees the fixVersion field for normal use.
The said Rapid Board and the restructuring as a whole are described in detail in the Future of GreenHopper :
The Rapid Board is a new start for GreenHopper. We are building it to take advantage of the latest web technologies and provide you with a client with vast experience in planning, tracking and reporting on the progress of your flexible projects and teams.
The Rapid Board and related functionality are currently improving rapidly, i.e. The GreenHopper team iterates quickly and dramatically improves current monthly releases by even two weeks.
I completely sell this approach, which basically builds the board on top of the universal JQL functionality (see Advanced Search ), which allows almost complete freedom to build the perfect board for your needs.
In addition, he resolved the impedance mismatch between the version and the sprint for us, since sprints are now decoupled entities, and versions can be reused as desired, which gives a useful version and a client based on the release date facing JIRA Roadmap in turn.
The transition to this new approach is, of course, a separate work that requires some planning and time in the end, there are also some drawbacks to previously available functions; for example, an unresolved story As a user, I would like to customize the cards displayed on the fast board (GHS-3922) , it is important for us because we use Philippe Kruchten's innovative approach to backwardness (see What color is your backlog? ) with great success and this is not possible for the Rapid Board yet.
Finally, GreenHopper 5.9 requires JIRA 5.0, which may or may not be showstopper right now.