Clean all ranking from a project

Question

So, I do get where the Rank feature is useful. I can manually sort my backlog and Sprint. Great!

However, I have rather an old project, running over 3 years and the backlog is full of skeleton bugs that have such a low priority right now that they might never be addressed. However, when we developed those features a couple of years ago, they might have a priority. So I might have moved them higher on the board. Well. 2 years passed and they now show on top of the list when ranking is on.

Is there a way to clean all relative ranking so I can start with a "clean slate"?

Thank you.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @david_kubac

What exactly do you want to accomplish with these old bugs?

Do you want them to automatically be lower in the ranking than everything else?

Do you want them to not display in the board ever, or just have the option to hide/unhide them?

Do you want them to still be included in filter results for the project when querying for "not-done" issues?

Here are a couple of ideas.

Create a new sprint to hold all those "old" issues. This would be a dummy sprint that you would never start. You move those old, probably will never be address bugs out of the Backlog and into the dummy sprint. You could collapse that not-started, dummy sprint on your board to visually "hide" the bugs, and leave only the items you think you'll actually work on in the Backlog.

Add a tag or custom field that can be set to identify these old bugs. Then use a Quick Filter in the board to hide them. They would still be there, and you could view them if you wanted to, but they could also be hidden when you want to work on prioritizing the issues you think you will actually address.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

If you changed the context of the rank field, setting it to be valid on all projects except this one, you would blank it out.

But, this would destroy the ranking of all the issues in the project, and when you changed the context back to global, the issues would again be ranked at the bottom of your backlog.

Your best option remains to rank the open ones to the bottom of the backlog where the teams will continue to ignore them (as a team is only really interested in the issues ranked highest)

david_kubac_3jadf6 · Answer

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Thank you for the answer.

You could remove the ranking field from the project context

How would I do that? Sounds promising. I could remove it, wipe the rank, then activate it again and gain the "clean slate".

The best thing to do here is close the issues

While I'd like to do that and remove those 200+ old bugs, that is not an option. The bugs are still there. They're just so minor that I can't see us ever tackling them. But that doesn't mean the bugs are solved if I just archive them.