Can I use rank on a Kanban board to ensure top issue is transitioned?

[Ryan Smith]

One of the engineers I work with asked if it was possible to force JIRA to only allow the top issue in the "To Do" column to be transitioned.

While I'm all for being trusted to pull from the top, I was curious to see if it was possible, as in theory it sounds like it should be - using conditions. 

I'd have thought you'd be able to use a condition that says rank of issue > rank of other issues in column - allow transition. 

I can't seem to find that as an option though. Has anyone else tried? Know of a solution that doesn't require an addon?

Thanks in advance

Ryan

[Earl McCutcheon · Accepted solution]

Hi Ryan,

Ultimately I would recommend not attempting doing this as it really takes away the agile nature of an agile board, Where Agile methodology is all about prioritizing work items but applying that work in a non ridged manner for dealing with change in a development cycle avoiding limited restrictions in place.   While limiting Work in Progress (WIP) items is a good technique, i.e. manually limiting the number of items present in a board by filter restrictions, enforcing restrictions on WIP within the board will limit the ability to change in an agile maner. As covered in the Article Kanban vs. Scrum: 

"Agile is a structured and iterative approach to project management and product development. It recognizes the volatility of product development, and provides a methodology for self-organizing teams to respond to change without going off the rails."

Then Kanban Specifically is about not restricting Flow:

"Kanban is all about visualizing your work, limiting work in progress, and maximizing efficiency(or flow)"

Also a Rank value is a global object, every issue has a rank, and does not distinguish values per project, so an issue in one project could have rank values lower than an issue in another project, as well as an issue appearing on multiple boards and using a Rank value to block progress based on position  in return this could be blocked by any issue that has a lower value anywhere in the system, so overall applying a restriction based on rank would not only take a lot of overhead to list all the rank values, but it would also be a sub optimal solution.

My colleague Andrew, noted a similar situation as to why restricting the the kanban flow would cause negative impact to the design of the application HERE, and he is even referring to another post noting the same negative impact this would have.

However with that said, there are scenarios where you do indeed need to have work done in a specific order, and for this I would recommend that the work item is broken out into a main Story with subtasks.  then set Swimlanes up for Stories, so that all the child work items are displayed in the main column to be completed to move progress on the parent.

Alternatively you could look into issue linking to provide a method of filtering out certain issues into alternate swimlanes or quickfilters to only display the desired issues.  On Jira 8.0 on Server there is a new JQL that just launched: "issueLinkType" that allows this but it is not yet available on jira cloud so you would need to look into some add-ons to add in a more ridged restriction,  A few ideas is to set up a link for blocks and is blocked by, then using ScriptRunner's extended JQL options you can create a filter using hasLink(link_name) and then use this again in a swimlane by filters so that any issue with the link type Blocks is set to an expedited swimlane at the top and everything else falls into the separate swimlane.

Regards,
Earl

[Ryan Smith]

Thanks Earl (and sorry for the delayed response).

I was really just curious about whether it was possible, but your answer is very detailed and helpful.