Can I sort issues in the Backlog view by priority

[Michael Simpson]

I'm a new user. I'm interested in planning sprints in the Backlog view because its easy to drag issues into a sprint.

But I'd like to view issues by priority to make it easier to plan by impact. Can't seem to do this...

I've read that I can create a new Board with different settings that allow me to view by priority in Backlog, but then I can't drag and drop....

I'm quite surprised this isn't possible natively / by default... isn't this a basic need?

Any help appreciated! 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You can sort a backlog by whatever fields you want, by using the "order by" clause.

But sorting by anything other than rank stops you being able to drag and drop because the fields are not ranked and hence cannot be ranked.

Yes, it is a "basic need", but it is one that has to be met with ranking, not sorting by other types of field.  The explanations of the logic and the mathematics behind this often get twisted up and hard to explain, so I will try a worked example:

Imagine you have four issues, the first four in the ABC project, and your backlog says simply "Project = ABC".  Next, imagine you have the following data for them:

• ABC-1  rank 1 priority high
• ABC-2  rank 2 priority high
• ABC-3  rank 3 priority high
• ABC-4  rank 4 priority medium

You can see they are ordered by rank.  Now, if you switch to ordering by priority, that's fine, it'll work.  And if you took ABC-4 and dragged it to the top of the list, obviously we change the pirority on it to "high".  But what would you expect to change if you dragged ABC-3 to be "above" ABC-2?

[Michael Simpson]

Thanks for responding!

I appreciate that JIRA has something called Rank. Maybe some useful use cases when shifting things around in a list I guess.

But for me, I'm mostly interested in dragging or assigning issues in Backlog into a sprint. For my purposes I'm not sure I need the concept of Rank - I'd be happy if all of the issues appeared in order of priority both in the sprint and backlog if that makes any difference.

Not sure why Rank has to be so tightly coupled with dragging......

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>mostly interested in dragging or assigning issues in Backlog into a sprint

You can only do that if you have a rank type sort order, non-ranked fields can't enable that function.

[Natasha Beseda]

Hi @Michael Simpson 

You can prioritize your Jira backlog with Ducalis.io and then make its ranking visible on issue cards in Jira. Thus, there won't be a real need for using "order by", you will still be able to drag'n'drop issues and be sure about their priority.

This is how it looks in our backlog.

You can read more here Jira Priority w/ Ducalis.io