Changing Rank Across Statuses

Haddon Fisher April 5, 2018

Is there a way to re-rank issues aside from moving cards around on an Agile board?

I have a team which uses a Kanban board to track the status of business or client-requested enhancements as they move through review and development. They would like to be able to see a "flat" list of all of their active issues sorted by Rank and be able to manipulate that ranking.

Currently the ranking can be viewed by searching in Issue Navigator, however you cannot edit rank from there. You can edit rank by dragging cards around on a kanban board or backlog, but their concern is that once it moves into columns you can no longer re-rank issues against anything other than issues in that status.

1 answer

0 votes
Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 6, 2018

Ranking in Jira Software is set by a lexorank value system.  While technically you could place a rank field on the issue screen and then try to edit those values manually, I don't think i would every recommend users attempt to do this.   The main reason is that this lexorank value is unique to that issue, and in turn this value can be changed within Jira without end user intervention.   Jira Software will rebalance the rank values for all issues possibly anytime the system sees a need to do so.

The actual value here is never meant to be seen by the end user.  The reason is that, this value can change, and it doesn't really matter what it is for a single issue, it matter more in regards to how that rank value stands in relation to the other rank values issues have in Jira.

If this was a scrum board, I would recommend simply going back to the backlog view.  From this view you could then still change an issue's rank without concern for what status it might hold on the active sprint board.

But since this is a kanban board, it's not the same here.  A Kanban board won't show you issues that are already done, or in progress.  If you're using the kanplan feature, you could transition these issues back to your backlog or selected for development status (or whatever status the kanplan feature is set to use).    Doing this would then allow those issues to show again on the backlog where you could change these rank again, but in this case, all the issues will likely have the same status again and I can understand that you would not want to transition these issues just to see them in the backlog once more.

Haddon Fisher April 6, 2018

I agree 100% that having users manually edit the global rank values is very much a bad idea for a host of reasons, even if it's possible.

The only other work-around I can think of is to make a second Kanban board with all of the statuses mapped to a single column, but that seems like such a hacky solution.

I am 99.999% sure this is also not possible, but if I am sorting by rank in Issue Navigator, is there a way to enable click-and-drag reordering to re-rank these issues?

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 6, 2018

I don't know of any way to do this in the issue navigator.  The only thing I could think of would be to use the issue navigator to create a saved JQL filter, and the create a board based on that filter.   Only then on the board could you then re-order the rank of those issues.

I could not find any existing plugins in our Atlassian Marketplace site that would offer this kind of functionality.

Haddon Fisher May 3, 2018

Thanks @Andy Heinzer - I ended up making a single column Kanban board. Not the most elegant of solutions, but it works!

Rolf.Okken December 9, 2020

I agree, simple and it works. Thank

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