I can't speak for everyone but some of us can't afford GreenHopper along with the JIRA license

Additionally, the ability to prioritize projects within Project Categories would be a great way for us to prioritize by separate departments. Thanks!

I've voted for this issue and am now watching it as well. Is there anything else I can do to push this along? This feature would be HUGE for our company. To add to this, though, we'd like the ability to separately prioritize overall projects as well via this drag-and-drop functionality. This would be in addition to prioritization of issues within projects, and then also prioritization of issues per assigned developer.

Hi,

Is there an estimate when this plug-in will be released / non-beta? This functionality is critical to out operation.

Thanks!
Charlie

I would like to add my "blessings" on this request. This little add-on would more a huge improvement on my installation and even save the long life of JIRA on our company.

We have many issues where same criticalities are assigned, but always have to go over a priorization process to define which one will take precedence sue to resources constraints. Unfortunately today i have all my issues/requests in JIRA, but must keep a separate control to knows what is the currnt one being worked and what would be the next one on the queue. This would improve tremendouslly my work and internal process.

I guess if you look into either Netflix or Blockbuster movie queue manager you will see exactly how this feature would work.

We're using Enterprise 3.13. We would love to have this facility. Why don't Atlassian work this into the code Jira code, rather than a plug-in that may break when the core is updated? Scrum agile development is picking up popularity. A development team that loses it's task prioritisation leader board for weeks while a plug-in is brought into line with a new Jira version could be a catastrophic event for the project.

I too am looking for the ability to rank issues. The plugin does not work for the release of JIRA I have so having the ability to rank issues is missing. I'm adding my voice to having this feature in an official release as it seems rather odd to not having it already there.

Is work still going on on this plugin? We really like the approach this plugin has taken to ranking - it is very flexible.

Like many others on this issue we are using scrum and we are in a position where most of engineering is now using another tool for their agile dev management. That other tool also contains defect tracking and I would hate to see us in a spot one day where they want to replace Jira solely with the other tool. Jira is a much better overall product but without the ranking it isn't meeting the needs of the organization.

Agile is already big but getting even bigger - I think this is a very worthwhile feature to have.

This feature is now supported by GreenHopper.

Cheers,

It looks like I created a duplicate issue regarding this @ https://support.atlassian.com/browse/JSP-18538

See http://www.namastenetizen.com/collatodo/wp-admin/?tag=un

I want every user to look at issues (by tag) and be able to rank by drag and drop and thus arrive at a community/group ranking

Hi Guys,

We are coming out in GreenHopper 2.0 with the ability to n prioritize your issues. (more like a ranking system)
It will be based on a custom field, so you will be able to create multiple Priority fields.
From GreenHopper you will just have to drag and drop your issues in the right order.
Since it is a custom field, you will have access to it from your Issue navigator for sorting and so on.

Cheers,

We're thinking of switching away from Jira because of this basic functionality is missing. We're using scrum and it's very frustrating having your issues in one place and priorities in another.

Can someone recommend a good system for agile development?

We recognise how this will make JIRA easier for people to use and more powerful and we are keen to provide a solution to this.

However, to put this in perspective, this feature won't make into the next 2, or possibly 3, major releases as the features that are already under development, or that are next candidates after them for investigation/development, will deliver functionality requested by a wider base of JIRA users and will require all available resources to deliver them.

Our prioritisation is not just based on the votes, but comes from other sources, such as support and pre sales interactions with customers, and in depth discussions with customers from many different areas on their usage of JIRA.

Thanks,
Anton

Indeed. A must for Agile organisation. Strange that the last reaction on this at Atlassian-side is from July 2005!

Jobe, which tool are you moving to?

At this point the lack of any solution to this is beyond an omission, it is a glaring flaw in JIRA. At least for any team implementing Agile methodologies. I am pushing my organization to move to another system.

I am aware of the plug in and portlet attempts to solve this issue, but neither are mature. I have also read and reviewed the priority backlog for JIRA, as an agile developer nothing on that list is even close in importance.

I'd like to add my support for this - it is an essential feature, I'm very surprised that this isn't part of JIRA out of the box.

We need to define custom filters with sort orders, and be able to fine-tune the order of tickets within this sort order, e.g. Sort by Priority, then Rank i.e. change the order of Critical tasks relative to each other, Major tasks relative to each other etc.

Customers need the ability to direct our efforts - we need to work on their Critical issues in the order that they prefer. Similarly our Service Delivery Managers need to further fine-tune the global list of tickets from all customers to ensure that certain tickets are actioned before others - without breaking the customer's relative sort order.

Priority does not give us sufficient granularity, so we need a secondary field which is supported throughout JIRA's views, filters, RSS feeds etc. This should be a core feature, not a plugin.

I also would like to see this. We use Confluence and are about to buy JIRA, but are also looking at agile tools and I know the lack of ranking will be a disappointment. If JIRA had that, I feel I could make a case for using the agile wall or GreenHopper stuff and just not getting any other tools.

Manual adjustment of rank = evil.

I must agree with Tero Ahola's comment of 9-Aug-07. One of our project managers just jumped ship from Jira to a hosted scrum-oriented tool because she needs to keep track of a prioritized backlog that is visible to the client.

As elegant as the RANK plugin is, issue priority is absent from ad hoc searches, RSS feeds etc. We can't let a client browse the project unless priority is integrated.

Today we use a priority (float) custom field, but it's extremely painful to edit a big list of issues one by one (and the numbers get ugly, and everybody has to manually configure their issue tracker, etc.). We really need to be able to do this on-the-screen during a meeting with business sponsors (instead of explaining how linear prioritization is so innovative that we have to hack it in to our issue tracker). Ajax drag-n-drop seems like an ideal solution, but we don't have the developer bandwidth to dedicate to writing an alternate GUI for Jira.

The space of agile-friendly project tools is really heating up. I'd hate to see Jira get left behind. What do we have to do to get some steam behind a core prioritization solution? It sounds like Nick Menere had the right idea 2 years ago (see top of comment chain)...

I find it very strange that JIRA development has done nothing to solve this issue. It seems that JIRA development could use this kind of functionality also to track the priorities for open issues, so important issues like this one would not be ignored

I have been using JIRA for little over a year now and this priority order seems like the most important missing feature. Browsing some 100-200 open issues can be very exhausting when planning future work It would help a lot if the issues could be arranged into a priority order so that you could check the lower priority tasks only when there is more time available for planning. This would require an easy drag'n drop user interface. I believe this single feature would be enough of a reason to make our company to upgrade JIRA to the latest version...

This plugin thing seems very promising, but I'm afraid it won't be an option for me because of our company's SW installation policies. There are also other users in our JIRA system and installing an external plugin to this system might be considered a risk. Well, I have to ask it anyways...

Hi guys,

It's good to hear that you've begun using the plugin.

This time of year in Denmark is the holiday season, and we've also gone on low steam until 2nd week of August

We'll pick up the pace again in August, and until then I advise you to report any errors you might come across to the RANK project in the Developer JIRA (found at http://developer.atlassian.com/jira/browse/RANK).

If you have trouble doing that, simply just mail your issues to me (you should be able to view my mail address on my JIRA profile page).

To Lars: It seems as though the plugin has trouble gaining access to the needed resources through the URL which the plugin generates automatically. Can you verify that you can access your JIRA through the URL: http://somebox/?

Cheers,
Thomas

Thanks Stephan that solved it. Now I have some new issues...

If I now double click a filter to create a new Ranking I get a popup saying : "The service call failed. The HTTP Status code is: 200". If I continue and close the popup and save the Ranking then I receive this error message: "The service call failed. The HTTP Status code is: 500".

This is Application Monitor output:

RankingPlugin Application Monitor

10:00:15.300 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Parsing the result of the request to ../plugins/servlet/rpGetIssues as XML produced an error: [109] XML Parsing Error: no element found Location: http://somebox/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10190 Line Number 1, Column 1: ^

10:00:15.316 jsx3.net.Service (ERROR) - The call to the operation, 'GetIssues', hosted at '../plugins/servlet/rpGetIssues' did not return a valid response document. The inbound filter (e.g., doInboundFilter()) as well as the inbound mappings (e.g., doInboundMap()) will not be executed.
Description: OK

10:00:15.341 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Error requesting Netscape privilege: A script from "http://somebox" was denied UniversalBrowserRead privileges.

10:00:15.385 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Error requesting Netscape privilege: A script from "http://somebox" was denied UniversalBrowserRead privileges.

10:02:37.241 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Error requesting Netscape privilege: A script from "http://somebox" was denied UniversalBrowserRead privileges.

10:02:37.358 jsx3.net.Service (ERROR) - The call to the operation, 'AddRanking', hosted at '../plugins/servlet/rpAddRanking' has returned an error (HTTP Status Code: '500').
Description: Internal Server Error

10:02:37.361 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Parsing the result of the request to ../plugins/servlet/rpAddRanking as XML produced an error: [109] XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </link>. Location: http://somebox/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10190 Line Number 56, Column 6: </head> -----^

10:02:37.363 jsx3.net.Service (ERROR) - The call to the operation, 'AddRanking', hosted at '../plugins/servlet/rpAddRanking' did not return a valid response document. The inbound filter (e.g., doInboundFilter()) as well as the inbound mappings (e.g., doInboundMap()) will not be executed.
Description: Internal Server Error

10:02:37.401 jsx3.net.Request (ERROR) - Error requesting Netscape privilege: A script from "http://somebox&quot; was denied UniversalBrowserRead privileges.

And this is the stacktrace for the 500 result:

java.lang.NullPointerException

at dk.translucent.atlassian.jira.plugin.ranking.helper.PropertyAccess.addRanking(PropertyAccess.java

:202)

at dk.translucent.atlassian.jira.plugin.ranking.servlet.AddRankingServlet.doPost(AddRankingServlet.java

:42)

at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:709)

at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)

at com.atlassian.plugin.descriptors.servlet.ServletModuleContainerServlet.service(ServletModuleContainerServlet

.java:38)

at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:802)

.............. REST omitted

BTW if this is not the right place to post these issues let me know where I can post them.

Lars

Lars - I had the same issue when I added the portlet to my main dashboard pane, but it went away when I placed it in its own pane per Thomas' original recommendation (below):

"Add the Ranking Plugin Portlet to your Dashboard (preferrably a to a new pane)"

Have you tried creating a new pane and adding the ranking portlet to it as the only contents?

Thomas - any tips on how we might edit the column setup in the portlet application directly? I'm not familiar with doing this.

Thanks!

I just installed it on JIRA 3.9.3. When I add the portlet to my dashboard and open my dashboard the image "TIBCO General Interface" stays there forever and I see the following error in my firefox console:

job.dup app.undefined.config
http://somebox/download/resources/dk.translucent.atlassian.jira.plugin.ranking:ranking/tibco/JSX/js/JSX30.js
Line 26

After restarting firefox the same error occurs.

I run firefox 2.0.0.4 on ubuntu-feisty.

Any idea's?

Thanks Lars

Has anyone tested this on Jira 3.7.2? We need this plugin, but we're nervous about being the first to run in on our Jira version.

Similarly, if we could have some reassurance that it won't corrupt issues or the db, we could probably move forward.

Thanks Thomas & Co for building this!

I've just installed a played around with the plug-in for a wee bit, and i must say "well done!" This is definitely a big move in the right direction and quite usable right now for managing our scrum backlog. Excellent work, Thomas & Co.

Incidentally...how would you prefer we give you feedback on this? As comments to this issue, via email, something else?

Thanks!

Hi guys,

The plugin has now been released in a beta version.

You can find it at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Ranking+Plugin.

Please note that it is not intended for production use yet, but that it is usable in terms of getting started with rankings and seeing what this plugin is all about.

Expect some minor bugs, though, and please do report them.

Cheers,
Thomas

We're eagerly awaiting Thomas' plugin. I want to vote for support for Scrum/Agile prioritization becoming core. There are something like 10000 (fellow) trained ScrumMasters out there and most of the Scrum-specific PM tools are very expensive. What's more, they don't offer the robust collaboration features of Jira or the support of Atlassian. I've been a Jira user for 8 years and I don't want to have to jump ship over such a simple little thing.

We've talked about writing an external app to provide Ajax reordering (like in the confluence task list tag) for issues. I'll post here if we get to it.

We have made our own tool for planning now. You can find an example at

http://backlog.kubosch.no/

Log in using

Login: anonymous
Password: secret

We still use Jira for Issue tracking, just not for iteration planning and registering work done.

Uwe

Hi guys,

We are nearing completion of the beta of this plugin. We have had some unexpected trouble with a bug that annoyed us for some time, but we got it straightened out. A little polishing is still needed, but we should be able to publish the plugin next week, though.

Have a nice weekend.

Cheers.

We just started with Jira and were a bit shocked this was not possible. Treating issues as objects in a queue seems so necessary. I voted in favor of this, and look forward to it being implemented.

Hi Guido, Nathan et al

Guido: Your mail went into a spam folder and I didn't notice your prior mail before now.

The development on the plugin stalled for a while for various reasons, with the plugin in an unreleasable state.

However, we have a working plugin, in the form of a portlet, which enables us to prioritise issues, but we still have some bugs we need to weed out.

We have taken up the work again, and we are dedicating resources for the project in the end of next week. So, hopefully we should be able to present you with a well-working plugin within a fortnight.

Cheers,
Thomas

I have tried to contact Thomas, but got no reply so far. It looks pretty dead to me.

We are unfortunately moving away from JIRA because of this not being resolved (for about a year now).
Other products that are less brilliant at issue tracking are much better at supporting an agile process.

I would love to see this item picked up again so we can use JIRA again.

Seeing the way agile development is picking up and taking over the market it could be quite a niche for atlassian to take over if agile tooling were improved and matured (burn-down plugin are also quite lacking for instance).

Any update on the ranking plugin?

We have updated the Ranking Plugin page with some more info on the plugin, including a couple of mock-ups describing the user interface in general.

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Ranking+Plugin

Cheers,
Thomas

We jumped far ahead of schedule and created a page "Ranking Plugin" in the "Plugin Wishlist" section of Confluence which is the primary placeholder for information about the plugin:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Ranking+Plugin

However, we'll have to work on the initial mock-ups, so please be patient as you'll probably wait some days for those.

Cheers,
Thomas

We at Translucent Technologies are currently making plans for development of a relative ranking plugin for a couple of our customers, as they need the feature as well.

We have engaged in a dialogue with Atlassian about the implementation of the plugin, as we wish to ensure that a future transition to another ranking mechanism will be manageable, should Atlassian choose to integrate relative ranking into JIRA.

Within the next two weeks we intend to publish some information in more detail about our thoughts for this plugin, and we might as well attempt to consolidate some of our ideas in the community before anything is developed.

Cheers,
Thomas
Translucent Technologies
www.translucent.dk

We are evaluating JIRA for use with Scrum and one thing we would like to do is maintain our product backlog. I also agree relative ranking is one of the most important features to be able to support this.

Has anyone implemented the custom code solution or know where one is available?

This is something we are having a problem with as well. Most Agile methodologies (except perhaps DSDM) rely on absolute ordering as described above.
For us this would definately help a LOT in getting JIRA to work well with our process.

To be really helpfull this feature should be configurable to be on / off per release on a project.

+1 (or actually +Integer.MAX)

Any news regarding this feature?
We're using Scrum and Jira for a while now. Jira is superb, but we're forced to use another tool to handle issue priorities. I see this as an essential feature for every agile development method. I hate to see myself googling for alternative issue management systems because of this "simple" feature.

Our company can definitely use this feature. In the interim, can we use JIRA's voting feature as a work around?

I would be interested in paying someone to build this functionality into JIRA. If your company or someone on your staff is interested in doing this on the side, please have them contact me.

We cannot promise a release date or version, unfortunately - we generally only plan one version in advance, and as you'll see from the popular features list, there are many other features waiting to be implemented too:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:popularissues-panel

Now that 3.2 is out, is there any chance this feature can be added? We are now upgrading to the Enterprise Edition, and the need for ranking/prioritizing our outstanding issues becomes more pronounced. Also we feel we do not have the time or resources to add this ourselves.

Hi,
The only thing I can say for sure is that it wont be in 3.2. After that, don't know. Once we get 3.2 out, we will sit down and scope the changes the changes for 3.3, but we will consider all new feature requests.

Nick

Hi!

Thanks for the quick reply. is there a chance this may be added as a standard feature? We really notice every day the need to strictly prioritize our issues.

Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion. We always love to hear how our customers use JIRA and the ways they want to take it in the future.

This "could" be done with a new custom field type, but may be a little tricky and Java knowledge essential.

For an overview on how to create new custom field types, check out:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Customizing+Custom+Field+Types+Tutorial

A rough implementation (off the top of my head) would go something like this:
Create a new custom field type that basically stores an integer.
The column view would consist of a couple of arrows - up and down. These arrows would link to methods that would swap this new priority number with the one directly above or below in the list. You will have to sort out how to deal with the ones in between though this may be as simple as issuing an SQL update statement to increment or decrement this new value by one if they lie between the 2 issues.

You can decide how you want to display the view and edit fields.

There are matters that you will have to address such as the lucene indexes and the issue cache. You will want all these to be sync.

As I said, it "can" be done but may get a little tricky. Though we are always here to help you through the tricky parts.

As far as permissions go, there is an example of restricting acceess to a field to only admins in the tutorial listed above.

Let us know if you decide to go down this path and of any successes you have.

Cheers,

Nick

This priority may be held completely separate form the current priority. We would call the existing priority for "Severity". Users of Jira that do not need or want the strict priority should be able to turn it off.