On a Scrum board - Is it possible to order issues by Priority while keep using Rank (drag and drop)

Question

On Scrum boards once you modify the the Filter Query replacing ORDER BY Rank with ORDER BY Priority DESC, Rank would obviously be disabled and this won't allow you to drag and drop issues.

I have tried this option but that would still disable Rank

ORDER BY Priority DESC, Rank ASC

Can someone provide a solution to keep drag and drop issues while ordering issues by another field?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

No, the drag and drop re-ordering can only work when based on (a effectively unique) single data item.

I do think there's some use for grouping then ranking, but that isn't intuitive for the users, and Jira doesn't support it.

It's quite complex to explain, but if you imagine you had 5 issues in a list, 2 high priority, 2 medium and 1 low, and ranked 1-5 to begin with, and your list is ordered by priority first, then rank second.

What do you change if you decide to move drag the "low" issue to a position between the two high issues and the two medium ones?  Obviously, you can re-rank it in position 3, shoving the two mediums into 4 and 5, but what do you do with the priority?

If you don't change it, your list can no longer be shown accurately because the rank says the issue is in the middle, but the priority is the primary sort item, so it has to be at the bottom.  Which one is it?

If you do change the priority, then what do you set it to?  Medium or High?  And do you rank it within its new priority at the top, the middle or the bottom of the group?

And is that really a valid thing to do?  Imagine a case that there's a spelling mistake, priority = trivial, and the estimate for it is the minimum of 1 story point.  The maths says your team have a spare 1SP to draw in, and you're going to be working on something in the same area, so you might as well pull this one into the sprint.  Suddenly, something that is clearly trivial needs to be re-prioritised as critical, just because you have said "meh, we can fix this while we're there".

So, while this looks simple on the surface, it really isn't.  "Order by rank and nothing else" is the most simple solution.  It could be improved with some grouping (I'd love to be able to group, then rank within group), but for ranking to work properly, it has to be "order by rank".