How to order stories in an Epic?

[Jenn Sherman]

I've added a bunch of stories to an epic and now I want to put them in order on the epic.  I though I was able to drag and drop on the epic issue screen, but that doesn't work.  Any tips?

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Jennifer,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the order that the Stories are displayed under an Epic in the Epic view screen.

We have a feature request opened to implement this functionality:

- Ability to change the order of the Issues in Epic

Feel free to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority and also receive notifications about any updates.

For now, you can create a board or a filter (On a dashboard gadget) to return the issues from a specific Epic in any order you want.

Let us know if this information helps and if you need more instructions to implement the workaround suggested.

[Jessica Bush]

Hi what dashboard gadget can I use to reorder stories in an epic?

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Jessica,

Actually, you would need to set a parameter in a JQL filter to set the order of the child issues in the Epics and display it using the filter results gadget. Let me give you an example:

Let's suppose you want to display all issues under the Epic "test-1" ordered by the creation date. These would be the steps:

1 - Create the following JQL filter:

2 - Navigate to your dashboard and click to create a Filter Results gadget, adding the filter you created

Let me know if this information helps.

[Mary Flynn]

This has been open since 2014. Please vote for it here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-40929. The ticket status says it needs enough community interest from unique domains before Atlassian will take a look at it. 

[Mary Rajczi]

I also think it would be nice to filter by status.  But being able to change the order of the stories under an Epic would be great.  It appears to be a random order.

[matthew.rothenberg]

Yes, please. This is a hassle, and I'm sorry to see it's taken six years to address! 

[Giulyanna Loureiro]

JQL wouldn't work for us I think because we want to order based on our business priorities and pretty much drag and drop like we do in the backlog.

[Kenneth Dickerson]

Peter, that's a horrible option. Why doesn't Atlassian want to make this change. This is a basic agile feature. I'm in absolute awe regarding the lack of this basic functionality.

[Andrew Widjaja]

I found that reordering the card in the backlog will change the order in the epic. Not an ideal situation, but it works nonetheless

EDIT: 21-Dec - I found out that once you add the cards to the sprint, the order inside the epic is messed up again. Oh well.

[Sebastien Sauter]

There is a a Sort by but not a manual drag and drop

[Sebastien Sauter]

Vote here

Vote here as-well to push this story
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-76877 

[Chris King]

Hi, It is May of 2022. Is there any chance this basic feature is going to be implemented any time soon?

[Christopher Kreisberg]

This is crazy, that this is not yet implemented. This is a basic feature

[Chirag Bhatt]

it is simply hard to imagine why this feature is not implemented. it is NOT complex to implement from a software development perspective... and SO MANY people want it... its ridiculous

[Sebastien Sauter]

Vote here as-well to push this story
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-76877 

[Michael Davé]

I agree @Chirag Bhatt .  Atlassian takes the platinum medal hands down for completely ignoring their users.  For a company that creates tools for Agile and Scrum, that is truly sad.  This is a trivially obvious and easy feature to implement.  I have no idea why it takes over 3 years!

[Enoch.Robinson]

This is misleading. This is not solved, nor does it appear like its going to be solved.

[Charles S_]

I have gotten this to work with JIRA Server. Hopefully it works for JIRA Cloud too. These are the steps I took to get this to work.

1. Create an Agile board (I use Scrum): 
   https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/creating-your-agile-board
2. Configure your quick filters and order by rank: 
   https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/configure-quick-filters/
   Example: "Epic Link" = PROJECTKEY-1234 ORDER BY Rank ASC
3. Return to your board and move tickets up/down in the "Backlog" list.

Your epic should now reflect the same ordering. It would definitely be nice to do this directly on the Epic, but this at least works right now. Hope it helps!

[Giulyanna Loureiro]

it worked for me on cloud too! :D awesome! thank you!

[Rich Wolverton]

Excellent and creative. Nice work!

[tim dugan]

when you open the JIRA card for the Epic, this does not help the order there.  

when you click on an Epic in the backlog screen, then that order is the same as the backlog.  but when cards are in different sprints, etc. then this fails.

Priority only has a few values, you cant sort by that.

Maybe the Epic priority should be the same as the order in the backlog?  but that's been hard to manage.  

On the Jira Epic card, you can move those items to bottom or top.  But other screens have drag and drop for ordering--like releases.  That's all we need...a sprint order that can be easily changed by drag and drop.  or if you want, add a filter for sorting.    

[david_nichols]

This solution worked for me - thanks!

[Jon Amar]

Want it. 

[Kenneth Dickerson]

Would be nice to be able to order them just like you can a sub-task.

[Deleted user]

Commenting here in hope of bringing more awareness to this request. 

Prioritising stories and subtasks is essential.
The downside of not having this capability is larger than upside of having it, if you get me.
Thanks

[Teresa Mardones]

waiting on this featured to be rolled out.

[Jenna_Hansen]

This is the number one complaint I have and get from product owners... You create a bunch of stories at the start of a new feature, and then there is no way to logically order them. Such a shame. I have voted, but doesn't seem to do much good... people have been asking for this foryears. 

[tim dugan]

you can order them in the backlog, but not in the epic

[Mary Rajczi]

I also think it would be nice to filter by status.  But being able to change the order of the stories under an Epic would be great.  It appears to be a random order.

[tim dugan]

(mistake, sorry)

[Ed Gomoliako]

Thanks to the helpful comment provided by @Chamilka Wijeratne, I learned the ticket order in the board backlog reflects on the issue order in the Epic.

[Aarthi Venkata]

Just tried this out and it did not work. I rearranged the stories in the backlog, but they are not in the same order within the epic. 

[Ed Gomoliako]

I use the Cloud version and it worked for me just recently. Probably it worth to mention that the tickets and the epic I have are in the same Jira project. Though if all the tickets of the epic are on the same board, I guess it should do the trick.

Filtering issues by epic in the backlog helps to see only the issues requiring re-arranging. Also, make sure you've rearranged all of them, including those that are in the backlog. Sometimes it requires using "send to the bottom of the backlog" and "send to the top of the backlog" functions to achieve the desired order.

[Jenna_Hansen]

Ed, that is the problem. The people complaining here are asking NOT to have to do this in a backlog with other issues mixed in. We just want to be able to order our epic at the epic level and see only the epic's issues and be able to order the way we want. 

[Ed Gomoliako]

Jenna, thank you, I see your point. I believe the accepted answer makes it clear that the feature is not implemented and a subject for further development.

The goal of my comments is to provide information about an alternative way to attain the desired. At the end of the day what's important is that one could get information properly presented by the tool helping teams to get aligned.

[Phillip Coppney]

At the end of the day, we need the tool to do the job we pay for it to do.  Sorting the issues in an epic does not seem like too much of an ask.  Workaround's are always half done, and you always get half the result.

Appreciate the contribution, but this seems like it should just be there.

[Sofiane S.]

Do you think you will ever release this feature ? 

I totally agree with some people who say that it is ridiculous not to have this feature.

[Hugo Freire]

Now it is possible to order epic issues from the Roadmap view https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-40929?focusedCommentId=2840936&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-2840936

[Scott Klein]

Not solved

If you need the requested implementation of this please go vote for: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-76877

[IT]

We are growing in Agile and Scrum and JIRA doesn't change it, we have a lot of problems when we forget create a task, we can't go up this task.

[Alex Chousmith]

It is too bad that this shows as Question Solved, when the Solved part is an accepted answer from 2019 that the backlog item from 2014 has still not been addressed. It is 2021 now. A bit ridiculous.

[Mary Rajczi]

Evidently, doing this enhancement is complicated for the way it is designed.  I ask Jira development, what is the complexity, why is this difficult to do?

[Jason M L]

As many have reported, it seems there's no way to reorder/sort the stories from the Epic view itself.

HOWEVER, the order of stories in my epics DO seem to reflect their RANK, based on how they are ordered on my Kanban board. That is, I can reorder them on the Kanban board and see that order reflected in the Epic view.

Is this an acceptable workaround, or do you want to order stories in an epic by another criteria, other than Rank?

[Jenna_Hansen]

The problem is, i don't want to look at it as a scheduled piece of work, or even in my backlog.. This is useful for planning, for Product Owners and Scrum Masters getting an epic into priority order is really important before they even show the epic to the team, there is prework that needs to be done. 

I am curious if the Product Owners at Atlassian get irritated that this is missing in this view. 

[tim dugan]

not everyone uses the system the same way. maybe it's not an issue. for them