How can i switch Order By on backlog on the fly (Rank, Assignee, Priority)?

Question

Hi All,

I am hoping you can help with this. We've just moved over to Jira after using Monday.com, and I've had a few complaints from the team about sorting the issues and backlog.

They want to be able to sort the backlog, and swap between the different sorting methods.  For example, the CTO while in the backlog view would like sort (Not Filter), or guess i should say Order by either Assignee, Priority, Rank and have them in both ascending or descending order and switch between them, without having to change the Boards Filter Query.

So, as a test, I've removed the Order by Rank from the Board query so it reads "project = "Project Template" and type in (Bug, Story, Task, Sub-task, Epic)", and then added some quick filters to test, but they don't do anything.

"ORDER BY assignee ASC"

"ORDER BY priority DESC"

If we can't do this in the board's backlog, is there another way to display just the backlog so that we can then do this filtering?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The backlog is very specifically intended for ranking your issues, so the standard and default sort order is "order by rank".

You can have a backlog with a different sort order (as you say, edit the board filter), but if you do, then there's no way to rank the issues any more, so it breaks the whole point of having a backlog.

Quick filters are for filtering (drilling down), they cannot override the sort order on the board, because that would, again, break the board.

I recommend that you teach your users to use searches alongside your backlog.  Show them how to read a board's filter ("project = <something> order by rank" for example) and run it as  search for themselves.  The issue navigator that displays searches is sortable by any field they want, with a single click.

There are a couple of other things you can do.

- Somewhat clunky (and pointless because you won't be able to rank anything),  create Kanban boards based on the board's query with the different sort orders

- For the board, set swimlanes.  You only get one set of swimlanes, but you can define them on whatever you want.   The built-in options are stories, epics, assignee, and project. there is also "query", so you could create searches for "priority = high", a second for "priority = medium" and you're not limited to one field - you could combine that with "label in (Cat, Flamingo, Dormouse, Hare)"