In the backlog we can drag-and-drop backlog items to sort them into an order of high priority items at the top and low priority items at the bottom. Great. We can then start a sprint and see all the items' cards in the To Do column of the Active Sprint board and, thankfully, the cards are in the same order: high priority at the top, low at the bottom. Great.
(Jira's "ranking" is what I mean by "priority.")
But as soon as work starts and cards start moving across the columned Active Sprint (or Kanban) board, the visibility of the priority is lost. When a card is moved into a column, the card floats upwards with utter disregard for our decision of its importance. A low-priority card can appear above a second-highest priority card just by being in a different column.
I am aware of one work-around with which we can maintain the visibility of the backlog's order-of-priority on the Active Sprint board, but its cost far outweighs its benefit.
Is there a(nother) way of maintaining the backlog's order-of-priority on the Active Sprint board?
(The work-around: configure the board to have swimlanes based on Stories; then, because the backlog-items are now represented on the board not by cards but by swimlane-headers, we need to give each backlog item a sub-task; then drag not any backlog-item cards across the board, but rather drag the items' sub-tasks' cards. Benefit: we maintain the visibility of backlog's order-of-priority. Cost: valuable information hitherto visible on the backlog items' cards is hidden when cards are replaced with swimlane headers; also, that's a lot of otherwise unbeneficial Jira sub-tasks to create, keep track of, and close in addition to the backlog items themselves.)
