Sorting sub tasks when the parent is assigned to someone else

[Deleted user]

Here's our current Scrum board view (from one of the columns), swimlines are set by assignees:

I'm trying to sort between the 2 stories on the board while the story is assigned to someone else (multiple sub tasks to multiple assignees on the same stories) but it doesn't work.

if the story was assigned to the same assignee, you can drop & drop them but not when the story is assigned to someone else.

Is there's anyway to sort them on the column without using priorities instead for rank?

[Kit Friend · Accepted solution]

(In case it wasn’t obvious, setting priorities in the Scrum backlog at Story level does all this also - but I’m assuming as the question is being asked that doesn’t always suffice 😁)

[Kit Friend]

@[deleted] the issue at the root here (I believe) is that rank is a global bit of data that's assigned, but the swimlaning prevents Jira from understanding how that data relates to one another. 

I'd suggest a few of options here:

1. Create a duplicate Scrum or Kanban board without the assignee swimlanes applied. You can use this to sort sub-tasks and because the ordering is written back to the rank field, the ordering will be reflected everywhere in Jira
   
   
2. Focus on re-ordering by drag and drop within the ticket but there's some quirks: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Query-that-orders-by-sub-task-rank/qaq-p/1328129 
   
   
3. Is this about priority (Product Owner style) or logical ordering of dev tasks? If the former, could be worth considering ticket size and if these are genuinely sub-tasks or just small stories 

[Deleted user]

Hi @Kit Friend thanks for the response.

1. I've tried create a duplicate Scrum board with the same filter from the original board but without any swimlanes. Neither the drag & drop nor the "Send to the top of the column" worked.

Sorting is enabled only between sub tasks within the story it self. 
It is worth mentioning that IT DOES WORK if the story is on the same column.

2. Not sure how this is related to my problem

3. This is about setting the priority. Our stories have several sub tasks assigned to multiple devs. sorting the sub-tasks between stories is crucial in order to maintain the priorities

Thanks for your reply.

BR,

Gadi.  

[Kit Friend]

Hey @[deleted]

1. This is a “feature” of rank being a global field - similar to your swimlane problem if the items aren’t in the same status column when you drag them above/below each other you can’t see how that field is changing related to others. I’ve known some teams who workaround this by having a dedicated kanban board with all the statuses mapped to one column purely so they can relatively rank items in different statuses reliably but this normally ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. It might help here. 
   
   
2. Only useful if you’re worried about sub-task ordering also admittedly

[Kit Friend]

This was niggling at me... so assuming I've understood correctly, my global ranking board workaround does appear to work (even if it's not particularly elegant). 

1. Let's walk through this... here's your swimlane for Michael (In my head I immediately assigned him as being a QA) - poor old Mike doesn't get assigned anything sexy like a whole story, he just gets a smattering of sub-tasks. In this screenshot we can see that Story 2 is prioritised over Story 1 for him, which we want to fix. As you noted above @[deleted]

2. ...and for whatever reason, his team mates Jennifer and Kit have got the parent stories in multiple statuses, meaning there's no handy way to drag and drop them in and order on top of one another in a column:

3. So! We have to create our magic Special-rank-o-meter board to enable us to manage our priorities in a macro sense. Here's the column/status config...


...and what it looks like (you could exclude sub-tasks or have a quick filter that hides them if you want also - you can re-order them within their parent, but sub-tasks get carried up/down with their parent stories):

4. After all that fun and games ranking, when we go back to our 'real' board, Michael's sub-tasks now reflect the global ranking we've declared in our special board:

Hope that helps!

Aside: TBH I often find that sub-tasks are a bit of a mixed blessing - they can tend to tie teams in nots of complexity in breaking down things and people forget to focus on the thing of value (the story), but there's always exceptions (e.g. I've found them handy when we were able to have a Automation QA specialist work in parallel to dev happening to get the suite ready so that the merge/test/deploy was super speedy). 

[Deleted user]

@Kit Friend  Amazing! this workaround did the trick.
Thanks for taking the time and explaining this in detail!
It's an amazing answer!! really appreciate it!!

[Kit Friend]

Awesome - happy to help @[deleted]