Order-By-Date when an issue is moved to a specific status.

Lennart Wemlén

Hi, I would love some help with an Order-By question. I would like to Order-By-Date when an issue is moved to a specific status.

I have a Kanban board which covers two analyst teams and several development teams. Each team has their own board and we are also having an end-2-end board. When an analyst is done, they are moving the issues to Ready-For-Dev status which can be seen as Done for the analyst and the Backlog for the developer. The developer shall work FIFO – First-in First-out, so they have an interest in having the issues ordered by the date they are moved to Status-X. Status-X do not have to be the same status as Ready-For-Dev, it can be another.

I have tried with a filter at the board containing: ORDER BY updated ASC. It works, but have a major drawback. When someone adds a comment, it receives a new date and comes lowest in the FIFO-list.

An alternative is to create a date field, which is (manually?) updated when an issue is moved to Status-X. I do not like this solution since there will be cases an issue is not updated with the date.

Any suggestions?

Andy Heinzer

Jira does track transition date/times, but is not doing this in a manner where that data is stored to a custom field that JQL can then order by.  As you found, the 'updated' kind of works, but isn't ideal since any change to the issue will count as an update to the issue.

In my view what is needed here is a custom field that will store the date/time those issues where transitioned to a specific status.  That way Jira's JQL can properly order the issue by that custom field.  Jira natively does not provide a way to auto-populate this kind of field though.

There are lots of 3rd party plugins to Jira that could be used here in order to provide some kind of solution.   I think the simplest way to do this would be to use a plugin though such as the Jira Misc Custom fields plugin.  The reason I focused on this plugin is that it provides the ability to then create a new custom field type called "Transition Date/Time Field"  By using this kind of field on this project, you can then order by this specific field name.   That way you could keep the issues on that board specifically ordered by the time they were transitioned to that status, and not by when the issue was last updated.