As a PO or Scrum Master role, it is important to be able to easily search, filter and rank issues to make sure priorities are kept up to date, both on an agile board backlog as well as for in-progress issues. Currently, the only way to modify the rank field is via an agile board, which is tedious and cumbersome at best - and sometimes impossible to do at worst.

 

I have 2 specific use cases that I have encountered that help illustrate some of the problems I am describing.

 

Case #1: ranking issues across multiple boards

Suppose you have 2 agile teams working on a single project, each with their own backlogs and dashboards. When working on each team individually you can often use the backlog view for each teams' board to prioritize issues, but it is impossible to rank issues across the boards so the entire list (ie: all work for the entire project) is correctly ranked. Technically you can work around this limitation by rolling a custom agile board solely for the purpose of ranking cross-team work like this, or you can purchase an expensive plugin like Advanced Roadmaps, to provide a workaround but neither of these really solves the underlying problem well. Creating boards solely for ranking purposes can lead to confusion, especially if team members find and start using the wrong board. Further, using Advanced Roadmaps plans are often restricted to executive and management level staff, and thus aren't accessible by the development teams or POs making permission management more difficult.

 

Case #2: ranking unresolved issues

This issue is mostly applicable to teams making use of Kanban style agile boards. When issues are in flight (ie: not open or closed) they may appear in any number of states or columns on an  agile board. There are tools which will allow you to rank issues on these boards, but they are quite limited. For example, if you are using swim lanes to sort the issues (ie: based on assignee or component, say) there is no way to rank an issue from one swim lane in relation to issues from another swim lane. Similarly, if the issues appear in different columns (ie: to rank "in progress" issues in relation to "in testing" issues) there again is no way to rank those issues relative to one another.

Why is ranking of in-progress issues important? Aren't you typically supposed to define your rank from the backlog before work begins? In a perfect world, yes, but in practice priorities change and it is important to give users the flexibility to adjust to those changes in priority as easily as possible. In particular, when reporting status information in dashboards and such it is often important for that data to be displayed accurately based on rank. This ensures that users of those reports can ensure that work is being done in the correct priority order, even when it is in progress.

 

Request

In order to make it easier to rank issues independently from an agile board, I propose adding a feature to the "Filter Results" dashboard gadget that comes with Jira out of the box to allow rows in those tables to be ranked using the same drag-and-drop mechanics that are used when ranking issues on the backlog for an agile board. In this way users could create filters on their data to represent whatever view they wish, and then adjust the rank of those issues relative to one another, directly in the dashboard.

So as to preserve backwards compatibility, this new feature could be made optional and disabled by default. Simply providing an "enable ranking" option in the gadget configuration would allow users to turn on this feature whenever it makes sense for them.