List with Arbitrary Sorting

[Jamie Jackson]

I'd like to be able to create some kind of list with arbitrary tickets, and with arbitrary sorting, just for my own purposes. (I'd like to sort through a backlog before I queue things up and assign them, and issue priority isn't always necessarily want to sort them.)

As for arbitrary items, I can create a label on those items and then filter for that... so that part of the problem is solved. However, I haven't found a construct in JIRA in which to arbitrarily order tickets in a listing.

Suggestions?

[Doug Swartz]

Jamie, I think to answer your question best, we need to know what kind of list you are looking at in Jira. You mention a backlog. Are you looking at a Kanban or Scrum board? Are you looking at an issue search list?

Also, When you say arbitrarily order tickets, do you mean that you want to manually sort them, as opposed to picking one or more fields to sort them on?

[Jamie Jackson]

> do you mean that you want to manually sort them?

Yes, that's a clearer way to put it.

I say backlog, but I don't mean that in necessarily an "agile" sense.

Also, I'm not looking necessarily at boards, per se, but if one of those gives the manual sort option, that would be good.

By the way, I'd tried a Kanban board, for kicks, but there seemed to be some limitations to the way I could sort things within a column. For one, it groups subtasks. I don't have too much of a problem with that, I don't think, but there were some other constraints imposed that I couldn't make sense of. (I couldn't move something to the top, even though an alert claimed that it had been done, I also couldn't seem to drag and drop it there.)

[Doug Swartz]

I don't know of a way to manually sort issues in a search screen.

Both board types allow drag n' drop sorting. The closest to what it sounds like you want is a planning board. Today, unless they've changed it when I wasn't looking, planning mode is only available with SCRUM boards. 

I don't know why you couldn't drag an issue to the top, unless dragging wasn't working at all. For drag and drop ordering to be enabled, the board settings must have order by rank set.

This page also shows that when you are in plan mode for a scrum board, you can right click and move an issue to the top or bottom.

[GabrielleJ]

I don't know how to implicitly order them but in JQL, you can explicitly order them adding the "ORDER BY" clause. So I guess by just not adding this word will give you an arbitrary ordering?