JIRA Agile synchronizer: Ranks of issues from different sprints

[Marcel Sommer]

Hello, one question about the usage of agile synchronizer. I want to have epics and stories to be imported into a structure such that they are ordered by rank. In order to do this I use

1) Filter sychronizer: project = ... AND issuetype = Epic  order by Rank

so to get all Epics into the structure ordered as on the agile board.

2) JIRA agile synchronizer:

    Epics synchronized

    Rank synchronized

    Consecutive ranking

to get all the stories beneath the epics. Works fine, but: I have three "backlogs" on the agile board. The actual sprint, the backlog for the next sprint and the backlog with all the rest. Now the synchronizer sorts the stories by rank inside the backlogs but not with respect to the "backlog" rank. Confused? Example:

The agile board looks like this (assume only one Epic1):

Sprint 1 (started)

Story 1

Story 2

Story 3

Sprint 2 (in planning)

Story 4

Story 5

Backlog

Story 6

Story 7

In the structure after resync both filters we get:

Epic1

 Story 4

 Story 5

 Story 6

 Story 7

 Story 1

 Story 2

 Story 3

And I think this is a strange behaviour. Structure itself seems to work fine, because it sorts the ranks correctly. So the problem is that JIRA agile is giving the stories 1-3 ranks below the other stories. Is this intended? Does anybody has a workaround who I can get the ranking I want to have.

Thank you! Cheers, Marcel

P.S.: Even more strange: I just encountered that the behaviour differs from epic to epic.

[Eugene Sokhransky _ALM Works_]

Hi Marcel,

As we've discussed, this is currently not possible, but for dates this should work in the Structure 3.0.

For fixVersion, however, I believe it will require quite a bit more work. If i'm not mistaken, there is no way in JIRA to get the order of versions. If you have dates for them specified, this should be possible, but still not that straightforward.

[Marcel Sommer]

Hi Robert,

for JIRA Agile I can absolutely understand the behaviour.

The question for me is how I can get the ranking in structure? The JIRA Agile synchronizer only can sort the issues by their global rank, so we have some kind of non-deterministic behaviour here.

Is there a way to automatically import all Stories beneath their Epics with a defined ordering (perhaps also a freely chosen field like FixVersion, a date, ...)?

Cheers, Marcel 

[Robert Leitch [ALM Works]]

Hi Marcel,

Structure 3.0 is now released on Atlassian Marketplace, and allows you to apply sorting by any field, and at specified levels.

Please refer to the release notes for detailed instructions on migrating from 2.x

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,

Robert

[Robert Leitch [ALM Works]]

Hi Marcel, JIRA Agile is behaving normally here.

In JIRA Agile the positioning of Sprints above the backlog doesn't actually rank the sprint issues above unscheduled backlog issues.

In the JIRA Agile interface, once a sprint is created you can only rank its issues relative to other issues in that sprint. You can no longer rank them relative to unscheduled backlog issues or issues in other sprints because they're constained in different 'containers'.

In Structure, you can freely rank them relatively to one another because they're all in the same 'container' (the parent Epic).

[Marcel Sommer]

Sorry, I have some problems with CRLF :-) , so some empty lines are missing. I hope one can read it anyways.