How do I order the tasks on Task Board?

Question

How can I control the order that tasks/issues get tackled?

On Task Board I cannot understand how some tasks are set in to-do and some are listed as other issues. I cannot seem to change the order, nor find any documentation that explains how this works.

On Planning Board, I cannot move cards about - they all snap back into the same place.

I could prob set a due date, but if I have many issues to tackle in a day that wont work, and also I want toe order to be relative, not necessarily tied to a specific date.

Martin Cooper3 · Answer

I know what you mean and you are correct in as much GH is not that bothered about sorting on the taskboard. In an agile team the planning into sprints is basically saying do all these tasks in this iteration - there is no need to then have another explicit priority or rank as all the cards should be done within that sprint, which would normally be small window normal 2-3 weeks)

Ranking only really applies to the Planning board, to help decide which iteration sprint to assign the story/issue/card to.

GH is its own worst enemy as the UI is appealing to all, but the way it is (currently) intended to be used is in a specific agile / SCRUM or Kanban way, which is where you can hit the challenges. It can be used for anything but need to bear in minds its roots.

If you use the Outline View on the Task Board - then the parent Issue is stretched across all columns and the sub tasks show as cards within it. That way you can move the subtasks across columns (workflow) and clearly see the progression to the completion of the Parent.

If you want to limit the task board view to just show subtasks then can do this by using a Context:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Using+Contexts+to+Filter+and+Highlight+Issues

colin8 · Answer

Yes, thanks - ranking allows me a degree of control - though it seems that you cant separate out sub-tasks, ie they seem to be positioned immediately beside their parents, and if you try to move them, it seems to think you want to make them sub-tasks of something else, rather than simply re-order when they get done

eg often it is much more efficient to perform the same subtask across a bunch of issues (say, a copy & paste operation), rather than perform each sub task in the parent issue before moving on to the next.

Also, after ranking, I then go to the Task Board to find that while there is a degree of order, 3 issues that were marked as Blockers are left in the Other Issues list, as afterthoughts, whereas by definition I need to do them first. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Also, in the Ranking documentation article comments, it is suggested you can edit the ranking value in the Jira Edit Issue screen, but I cannot see a rank value under Edit Issue.

I might be missing something fundamental here, as I'm new to these kinds of tools, but as a manager, the ability to say 'do these tasks in this order' is something I regard as essential but seems not to be the basis around which Greenhopper is designed?

Danielle Zhu1 · Answer

I believe you can only sort tasks using the List view on Planning Board. If it still doen't work for you, check if you have a Ranking field defined in Tools -> Configurations. Also, the Rapid Board introduced Global Rank (across projects). You may want to check that out too: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/3532/when-will-the-rapid-board-graduate-from-labs>