Task Ordering: Priority then Rank.

[Brian Rhodes]

I have reviewed a few other topics regarding sorting options.

What I want to do is avoid having priority-based swimlanes just so that I can rank tickets within a priority category.

I was so disgusted by the responses regarding this functionality in the other topics that I thought it best to fire this one up again just to see what nonsense I get.

So, as others have asked, why can't I have a ORDER BY Priority DESC, RANK ASC on a board such that I get a default ordering with highest prio. on the top and I can order tickets within those priorities as I want?

This leaves me with limited value in the actual task priority as it promotes unnecessary asynchronous communication among our teams.

I understand that Atlassian will do whatever they're going to do.  I'm just gonna get my popcorn ready and await the absolutely worthless responses...

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Brian Rhodes -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

First thing, I am just another user trying to help by answer questions.  I am not an Atlassian or marketplace vendor employee.

The drag-and-drop feature to order issues in Jira is based on the Rank field, as you noted.  That spans all projects (and issues) in the instance, and so solves a technical (and business coordination) challenge of how to re-order things without the need to edit every issue, every time something moves / is inserted in the list.  That's the implementation Atlassian provided us.

And Jira boards are a view of the issues in projects, based on a filter.  That is local to that board. 

Putting those together, the board's filter ORDER BY can use whatever it wants, but if it is not using Rank ASC the drag-and-drop ordering does not work.  It cannot because the local ordering would need some translator to the global order...probably creating a mess across projects.

There have been many suggestions to offer other options for setting Rank (and so drag-and-drop ordering), such as these:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-692
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-18815
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-22032

You can watch / vote for these, or create your own suggestion to improve this feature here: https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Kind regards,
Bill

[Brian Rhodes]

I don't observe Ranking of tickets within one project having any impact on other projects within our instance.  When I modified the board filter for one of our projects, it had no impact on tickets in other projects.

If and when people want to do what I want:  deliver coarse filtering based on prioritization while allowing custom ranking within priority-based categorization they have to use swimlanes.  Swimlanes present, in my opinion, a cumbersome approach to criteria-based sorting systems.  Perhaps cumbersome isn't the right word for what it does as what it actually does is simple.  What it does is overloads the concept of swimlanes from parallel workstreams into ordered efforts.  Never mind.  I had it right.  It's terribly cumbersome.

I think I need to put this issue behind me and refocus efforts on developing technology which allows ordering of hundreds... perhaps thousands of items... in a near real-time fashion.  First, we're going to require processors that can perform millions of operations per second.

For anyone else who stumbles across this because perhaps you imagined doing something similar...  Check out those suggestions.  JSWCLOUD-692, JSWCLOUD-18815, & JSWCLOUD-22032.

Thanks Coach! </sarcasm>