Changing Rank Across Statuses

Haddon Fisher_it0ud2

Is there a way to re-rank issues aside from moving cards around on an Agile board?

I have a team which uses a Kanban board to track the status of business or client-requested enhancements as they move through review and development. They would like to be able to see a "flat" list of all of their active issues sorted by Rank and be able to manipulate that ranking.

Currently the ranking can be viewed by searching in Issue Navigator, however you cannot edit rank from there. You can edit rank by dragging cards around on a kanban board or backlog, but their concern is that once it moves into columns you can no longer re-rank issues against anything other than issues in that status.

Andy Heinzer

Ranking in Jira Software is set by a lexorank value system.  While technically you could place a rank field on the issue screen and then try to edit those values manually, I don't think i would every recommend users attempt to do this.   The main reason is that this lexorank value is unique to that issue, and in turn this value can be changed within Jira without end user intervention.   Jira Software will rebalance the rank values for all issues possibly anytime the system sees a need to do so.

The actual value here is never meant to be seen by the end user.  The reason is that, this value can change, and it doesn't really matter what it is for a single issue, it matter more in regards to how that rank value stands in relation to the other rank values issues have in Jira.

If this was a scrum board, I would recommend simply going back to the backlog view.  From this view you could then still change an issue's rank without concern for what status it might hold on the active sprint board.

But since this is a kanban board, it's not the same here.  A Kanban board won't show you issues that are already done, or in progress.  If you're using the kanplan feature, you could transition these issues back to your backlog or selected for development status (or whatever status the kanplan feature is set to use).    Doing this would then allow those issues to show again on the backlog where you could change these rank again, but in this case, all the issues will likely have the same status again and I can understand that you would not want to transition these issues just to see them in the backlog once more.