How to maintain backlog's order (ranking) on the active sprint board without swimlanes or sub-tasks?

Greg September 17, 2018

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.)

1 answer

2 votes
Troy Spetz September 17, 2018

We use JIRA server 7.12 version.

 

I see your problem (as we have the same one).

 

I don't think there is a solution (or at least I haven't found one yet!)

 

The best we have come up with is to add Quick Filters to the top of the active Sprint Board so we can filter issues by Priority.

 

See attached screenshot.

JIRA_Planning_Board.png

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