Can I rank user stories in backlog so that I know the order of the stories?

Question

I want to rank user stories in backlog in  a sequence of 1,2,3,4 which can be viewed by looking at backlog so that I know the priority of the user stories so that I make a decision of which one needs to be completed.

Is there any field in Jira so that numbers are added in user stories?

Chris Hurney · Answer

Again, I understand the concept of valuing the importance of a visually prioritized list over numbers which, out of context, are meaningless, but the reason you've given here doesn't resonate with me.....renumbering "a LOT" of issues is something that a CPU is more than capable of handling, easily, programmatically.  To say it "doesn't work" is bordering disingenuous - TFS does this just fine - the compelling argument against it is, "is it actually useful", not "it doesn't work."

BTW, if you have 4 million issues in your product backlog, your organizational problems are a LOT bigger than getting a number to show up in a field on a JIRA Issue.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Because it does not work.  Rank used to be numeric, but they changed it because it fails in all but the smallest of systems.

To use your example, of inserting a new item at 34 between the existing 34 and 35, you would need to push 35, 36, 37... down one point in the list.  Now imagine your list is 4,000,000 issues long.

Chris Hurney · Answer

I agree whole heartedly with the sentiments that seeing a single JIRA issue's numeric rank, out of context, has no value.

However, I would argue that having a human-readable numeric rank might have some administrative value.  Let me be clear...I am an agile practitioner, and the last thing I'd ever want to do is add more administrative overhead, in some tool, for a team.

But, what if I had just created an issue in JIRA, and prioritized such that it's stack rank is 35.  Then, what if, a predecessor emerged, I authored the new dependency in the tool, and was able enter "34" in some stack-ranked field, without having to go back to the larger, global backlog and drag that new issue to it's proper location (although, I'll admit this may not be an issue if creating a predecessor 'automatically' put the new issue in the appropriate position in the backlog.  But I could see other administrative advantages to having this functionality as well.

I guess the question I'd have for Atlassian is, if enough people are asking for it, why NOT put this functionality in?  What potential pitfalls, dysfunctions, or anti-patterns might occur from having this functionality in place?

Looking forward to the replies...