Backlog prioritization

[Chad Benfield]

Is there a way to prioritize the backlog?

We are currently using the free JIRA cloud version.

I haven't found a way to do that yet.

I hope to upgrade to standard.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chad Benfield and welcome to the Community!

Ways to prioritise the backlog are not features you have to pay for. Prioritising a backlog is usually done by manually ordering issues (stories, tasks, ... - whatever types you use) in the order you want to have them executed.

Sometimes, people want to use all kinds of aids to help them: they set priorities to issues or use more advanced mechanisms like weighted shortest job first. They all have their merits, but in the end you will end up with several issues sharing the same priority or weight. And then you still need to be able to rank these 12 highest priority issues from 1 to 12 - manually.

The only place in Jira where I can imagine this is not working sometimes, is in the board of a company managed project that is based on a filter. If the filter does not contain ORDER BY Rank at the end, manually reordering your issues (in the backlog or on the board) will not be possible. In that case, add ranking to your board filter.

Hope this helps!

[Chad Benfield]

Thanks! I appreciate your time.

It seems my issues is that I wasn't defaulting to RANK when I exported from JIRA to .csv for meetings.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The backlog is intended to be ranked, rather than prioritised.  If you have created a board with a standard filter (or you are using a board with a fixed filter), then the filter will be something like "project = xyz order by rank"

If the filter is ordering only by rank, then you can re-rank issues in the backlog by simply dragging them up and down around each other (and the context menu gives you a couple of other options like "bring to top" and "push to bottom")

The backlog is supposed to represent the team's list of items that need attention, in the order they need to be looked at (which is not necessarily the same as priority)