Best practices for using priorities in JIRA

[Baheej Al-Khatib]

We are using the built in priorities for Jira, Blocker, Critical, Major, etc. What are the best uses for priorities? How does my team make the most use out of them? Is there also any way to rank by priority level in my dashboard view of my current sprint?

A few tips and some pointers on how they can used properly will be greatly appreciated.

[Jack Brickey]

are you on Server? The only reason I ask is that on cloud I think the defaults are Highest, High, Medium, Low, Lowest.

Regardless of what they are you should feel free to redefine you priorities to fit. Having said that I generally use these definitions for my IT service desk project and generally I think it applies or can be easily adapted to any project. The issue comes in when looking at what your team is doing to be able to more accurately adapt/define the priorities. For example, let's say you are developing and delivering software. In this case a Blocker would be where QA is unable to test the new feature at all, whereas a Critical would say that while we can test some aspects of the feature the issue is such that it brings results into question resulting retesting. Now if you were working on business projects a Blocker might be that the project or some aspect is fundamentally on hold where Critical would say that some folks in the team can make progress but one critical component is impacted and can't continue. So in the end, to a large extent, it is up to you and your team. The important thing here is that you take the time to document the definitions and gain agreement, if not consensus.