Why is the sprint value not factored into the ranking on a kanban board?

[Emil Schnabel]

We have scrum boards for delivery but also Kanban boards that look at the refinement process in order to get stories in a ready position. On the ranked Kanban board, stories with different sprint numbers are not showing in sequence. How can we get it to show first the sequential sprints and then the rest of the backlog according to Rank? Ordering it by sprint takes away the ranking capability.

Thanks.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The kanban board is only looking at rank, whereas your sprint backlogs look at rank and group by sprint.  The grouping by sprint effectively hides the ranking, and the rank within all the sprints may well be all over the place when you look at them all together (as you do on a Kanban board)

To get it "right", you'd need to have a view that includes all issues in an open sprint, and you'd then need to rank them all into chunks determined by sprint, so that they broadly stay together on the Kanban board.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Emil Schnabel 

Yes, and...to Nic's suggestion, you could use swim lanes by JQL to provide some organization on the Kanban board.  Such as generic JQL for lanes with the current sprint, all future sprints, and issues not yet in a sprint. 

If you wanted this finer-grained, sprint by sprint lanes, you would need to update the swim lane JQL each time sprints change.

Best regards,

Bill

[Emil Schnabel]

Thanks, guys. This was really useful.