Sorting In Backlog by Epic

Question

I'd like to be able to apply a filter on my backlog that will group together all the tasks within the same epic. I don't really care what order the epics are, maybe alphabetical or something, but essentially I want it to look like this:

* task 1: epic 1
* task 4: epic 1
* task 5: epic 1
* task 2: epic 2
* task 3: epic 2
* ...

How would I go about making that filter? I suspect ORDER BY is the operator I want but I have no idea what field to search for.

Daniella Eguiguren · Answer

Hey Luca! I just tried this and it worked for me. I have a board set up to show me all tickets belonging to a specific component. I'll call that component Team A for ease of use. My JQL now looks like this:

project = [name] AND component = "Team A" ORDER BY parent asc

Now on my backlog and any sprint I am putting together displays tickets grouped by epic in alphabetical order. Then below everything that has a parent are tickets without epics/parents. Attaching a screenshot with some redacted data, but so you can see what I see.

CON: This works for me because I know the rank of each of these epics in our roadmap and therefore the sequential order they should be tackled in from a business perspective. But this information is not visible in the backlog. We store this sequencing within Jira's Product Discovery feature instead.

Hope this helps!

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Luca Guerrera

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Can you confirm the type of project you are working with is a Software project?

Are you working with issues in a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project? That information will be shown at the bottom of the navigation panel on the left. The answer to that question is required to determine what field would be used in the ORDER BY clause for this scenario.

However, the Backlog and Board screens are intended to have the issues ordered by Rank. Issues with a higher Rank are higher up on the list, indicating they should be done first. Ordering by Rank allows you to manually drag and drop issues in the list to change which ones have higher priority.

You can't change the ordering of issues in the backlog by applying a quick/custom filter. The ordering of the issues is part of the underlying filter of the board.

If you are working with a Team Managed project it is not possible to change the underlying filter of the board.

For a Company Managed project if you change the underlying filter so that the ORDER BY clause is no longer set to Rank, then in the Backlog and Board screens you will no longer be able to manually change the order of the issues.

Given that information, are you still sure you want to change the order of the issues in the backlog screen to be based on their parent Epic?