Issue rank changes when moving it in the board

[Alejandro Sánchez Medina]

Hello,

we have a Scrum board for managing issues statuses. We rank manually the issues in the backlog at the beginning of the sprint and use that order for other tasks.

The problem is that when we move issues in the board, it causes the rank to change also. Is that normal? Is there any way of avoiding it?

Thank you very much.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Yes, the rank changes because the board is sorted by rank, and you are effectively moving the card in between others.  The card at the top of each column is the highest ranked card in that column, and the lowest ranked is at the bottom.

Imaginr a simple case:

To do	In Progress	Done
ABC-123 (rank 1)
DEF-456 (rank 2)
DEF-789 (rank 3)

 This won't cause a change in rank

To do	In Progress	Done
ABC-123	DEF-456
DEF-789

But this has to, because you've placed DEF-789 above DEF-456 in the column; you've ranked it higher

To do	In Progress	Done
ABC-123	DEF-780
	DEF-456

[Alejandro Sánchez Medina]

And there is no way to prevent this from happening? Either de-coupling the board from rank or anything like that. Because when you have 10-12 issues per column, it's impossible to remember its position in the rank relative to the issues that are in the new column, causing it to lose the ranking.

Or maybe we are not using the ranking correclty and we shouldn't be reordering the issues manually according to it's priority, but I don't know if there is a straightforward way to keep them sorted according to our own rules.

Thank you for your response.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No.  If you de-coupled the ranking, you would not be able to do any sorting on the board at all (and the ability to prioritise within a column is one of the uses of a board).  

Ranking is not prioritisation, it is more about "what's next" - a factor in that is of course priority, in general you will find you want to rank higher priority items above lower priority ones, but that's not always the case, there are other things to think about.

Of course, you could disable the ranking, change the board so that it sorts by priority and probably other things (priority on its own is not a lot of use - imagine you've got 100 issues, and 5 priorities - you now have up 5 blocks of issues that you can't prioritise within).  If you want to do that, you'll need to put your rules into the board's query - an obvious one would be "order by priority, created" for a rule that says "highest priority first, then sort by the age of the issue, so the oldest issue goes to the top of the priority block"

But that will stop you from doing any ranking - you're hard-coding your ranking

[Alejandro Sánchez Medina]

Ok, thank you very much for your help!