Dragging & Dropping Into A Queue By Rank

[dbelouso]

I am using a Kanban board and I have the following columns in it:

- Open

- Triaged

- In progress

- Resolved

When we analyze the ticket, we decide on its rank (i.e. where exactly in the Triaged column it should sit). Lets say we decide that it should be 5th in the order of priority (i.e. rank) in the Triaged column, so we take the ticket, drag it from the Open column and drop it into the Triaged column. 

The problem is that when dropping, we are not able to select to drop it exactly between, for example, tickets 5 and 6, because Jira highlights the entire column without the reference of the tickets that are already in that column. So what happens is that we have to follow a 2 step process - first drag from Open and drop into Triaged column and then move inside of the Triaged column to place the ticket in the respective order (e.g. 5th).

Can anyone tell me how to do it in one go/action?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I'm afraid there's no way to do it in one go.  Changing the column means you are transitioning the issue through its workflow, which is a process that does not cater for re-ranking at the same time.

[dbelouso]

Really disappointing I would though that this should be a basic feature :(

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It would be nice, but it's certainly not a basic feature.  Ranking is not something people would usually do when changing the status of an issue (and vice versa)

[dbelouso]

So what do people usually do when they get 10 issues reported/created a day and they had to maintain the previously ranked by priority column?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Scrum teams rarely rank in the board, it's not that important once an issue goes into a board.  Kanban teams tend to rank in the board, but mainly in the "to do" columns.

No Agile team ranks by priority.  Most don't even bother having a priority.

[dbelouso]

I did mention that I use Kanban that implies ranking. So if you use the 'To do' column for ranking - what happens to that column when you get 10 new tickets created overnight? How do you know the next morning which ones (since they are new) you should rank (i.e. triage) vs the ones that you have already ranked (i.e. triaged) before?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Same as you do when any issue is added to the to-do, or backlog.  You refine the backlog, putting the issue into the place you think it should be needed.

[dbelouso]

thanks, and how can you tell issues that have been added by someone overnight from the ones that have already been ranked in order?

[John Funk]

All new issues go to the bottom of the backlog when they are created. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, stuff gets added to the bottom of the list, so just look at that.  Your team will have read the new stuff "yesterday", so the 10 new ones will stand out to them.

[dbelouso]

Well, it does not stand out as I think we are making an assumption that the team remembers what was in the column yesterday and can work out what was added overnight. This is my whole point - there is no way to tell with 100% confidence what was added without remembering or recording the last item that was in that column 'yesterday'.... of course unless I am massively missing something here.

[John Funk]

Maybe add a Quick Filter based on the Created field?

[dbelouso]

yeah, thanks, there are hacks to try and make it work, I agree... just surprised that there is nothing purposefully build for it :(

[claudia]

we actually have exactly the same need. for us it's especially once someone has moved a ticket to the done column - the next morning in standup it's very hard to discuss which tickets have been done, because they are all over the done column rather than all at the top.

quite annoying as it's such a standard feature in all other sprint/kanban board tools

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Um, standups are not for discussing done items, just reporting that stuff got done, where each individual probably can tell the team what they moved to done since the last one.

If it is of that much interest (it shouldn't be, because it implies micromanagement and the opposite of Agile), then look at the history of the issue you are interested in.

[claudia]

depends how you run your standups. for us it's a bit of celebrating as well. I was just trying to explain why we need it. 

[John Funk]

Hi @dbelouso 

Rank out of the box in Jira is very complicated. On a board, I am pretty sure it has something to do with when that ticket actually came onto the board. So even if you change the order in one column, when it is pulled into the next, then it puts it back in rank according to the original rank. 

About the only thing you can do is create a custom field and put in a numerical value for how you want them ranked and then modify the board filter to use the custom field (or you could do it by due date or something like that where the date value is unique - but you still have to modify the board field to add the ORDER BY and the field. 

The other thing is that if you change it based on the field, all tickets on the board for all columns will be based on that ORDER BY - you can't have different orders by column. 

[dbelouso]

thanks, but order by rank is a must, which means that I want to manually pick where the tickets slots in relative to other tickets in the column

[John Funk]

You can manually pick for each column already - but it sounded like that is not what you wanted. It sounded like you wanted to set the order of each ticket for each column based on a recurring relationship. You can only do that by adding the ORDER BY to the filter. And you can't mix and match them - you can either do manually for all columns or none of them. 

[dbelouso]

I may have been unclear in my explanation, but what I want to do it to drag a ticket from one column and drop it between the tickets in another column in one go.

[John Funk]

No, you will not be able to do that. As I mentioned, how Atlassian does rank is very complicated as it is used across the platform and multiple boards. 

[John Funk]

@dbelouso  - If these answers have been helpful, please click on the Accept Answer buttons above. If not, please let us know what other questions you have.