There should be feature to sort the backlog and sprint issues based on priority

[Ishita Das Sarkar]

There should be a feature to sort the backlog and sprint issues based on priority. this will help to organise the backlog and sprint better

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Why?

It would only be of use once, when you first start trying to use ranking.  Once you start to re-rank issues, the sort process would become useless because it would destroy all your rankings when used.

Remember that priority is a flat set of selections, it is not the order in which things should be done like ranking is.  There are two important things about that statement - first, when you have more issues than you have possible priorities, the sort by priority can no longer have any use in choosing what to do first, and second, priority is ignorant and self-centered.  What use is it to have an "urgent" issue at the top of the list when it can't be fixed until you've done something about the "trivial" one near the bottom?

There is a use for sort by priority, but it is limited very much to "when I first get a pile of issues and have no idea where to start".  As soon as you move past that, it's of no use.

[Ishita Das Sarkar]

Umm. I slightly hesitate to agree on this point - "Once you start to re-rank issues, the sort process would become useless". 

The intention to have the sort feature is to group all high, medium, low, etc. priorities together.

The ranking process in the backlog is not stagnant, it's always rolling; so as a user, if I would like to see all Medium let's say priorities together, I can achieve that using the sort feature. 

Something similar to what we have on desktop "Sort by"

[Ishita Das Sarkar]

Right now, I have to manually drag-drop and place one after the other to group all similar issues (priority-wise) together

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, so imagine a really simple case - you have 5 issues and 3 priority levels.  When you start your new project with those 5 issues, you do a sort by priority and end up with 2 high first, one medium, and two at a low priority.

Now, your people rank one of the low priority issues as #1 (probably because they can't deal with one of the higher priority issues until that one is fixed)

Now click "sort" again.  Your two high priority issues jump up above the low priority one.

You have now broken your list of stuff to do, losing all the ranking that your people need to help deal with dependencies.

(Note, if you mean "sort only in view, do not adjust rank", that's fine, but it's pretty useless as a list sorted that way tells you nothing about the order in which you need to tackle things, and you can't rank things in such a view)

[Ishita Das Sarkar]

Nice scenario. 

If the low priority issue blocks one of the higher priority issues, it is not a Low Priority then- it should be highest as we cannot proceed without completing that one first

I would link both issues with the label "blocked by" and mark the low priority to highest. 

Now if I sort, the highest one sits on top that blocks the others high priority ones.

Hope this makes sense.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You're mixing up prioritisation with ranking.

>If the low priority issue blocks one of the higher priority issues, it is not a Low Priority then- it should be highest as we cannot proceed without completing that one first

Why?  Remember that priority is not for ranking (putting in order that they should be tackled), it's a way to group issues together for comparison with another group on the grounds of the reporters sense of urgency. 

Also, you can't prioritise dependencies like that.  What do you do in the scenario where you have ABC-1 as "top priority", ABC-2 as "top priority" and ABC-3 as "top priority" and you discover ABC-4 needs to be done before any of them?  All you can do is set ABC-4 as "top priority",  but that might not be what the reporter thinks it is, and cannot tell anyone that ABC-4 needs doing first.  

You need to be doing ranking if you're thinking like this and priority is not a rank, so there's no use in sorting by it.

[Ishita Das Sarkar]

To rank also, we need to drag and drop now. 

it would be easier for me to see sort according to the priority like ABC-1 as "top priority", ABC-2 as "top priority" and ABC-3 as "top priority" and ABC-4 s "top priority" and then rank the sorted items in the order in want them to. 

Imagine out of 100 items (e.g), I have to look for priority one by one and then rank them in order. Instead, I can quickly sort the ones by priority to see all similar items together and then start ranking.  

A sort by priority would make the feature more user friendly. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

As I said earlier, that's only of use the very first time you have a pile of completely unsorted issues.  As soon as you start to rank them, the sort by priority becomes useless, and in fact, counter productive, because it destroys all the ranking you are doing.

You need to stop mixing up prioritisation with ranking. 

There is a way to do this without breaking your ranking - create a board for each priority (for example, if you have priorities high, medium and low, create three boards, each one with a filter "priority = X order by rank").  You'll be able to rank things with the same priority against each other without breaking other boards.  Of course, it won't be a lot of use, as you'll be ignoring other issues in the backlog and all dependencies and what your product owners actually want to go into a sprint, but it will enable what you seem to think you want to do.