Question

How does Jira ordering work? What happens when users prioritize items differently or on different boards? How do I know if ordering is functioning correctly?

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Answer

Jira provides a way to order and prioritize items. On a board, simply drag an item above or below another to determine ranking.

Ranking is a global concept. Items are ranked against other items regardless of their Jira space, work type, or associated board. Ranking is not related to other standard fields like “Original Estimate”, “Story Points” or “Priority” but you can use these concepts together to influence your prioritization process.

An item only has one rank even if it’s included in multiple boards. The display order is based on an item’s relation to other items on the board.

If you change an item’s ranking on one board, the ranking changes automatically on other boards. Project Managers, Team Leads, and Product Owners need to work together to determine overall strategic priorities.

More about Ranking

Before a sophisticated ranking system was available in Jira, we all created a static, custom number field to track order. This was tedious to maintain. When priority changed, we had to manually renumber the values in the custom field. This was especially problematic for long lists.

Luckily, today, there’s a better method. Today’s system is called LexoRank and it uses numbers and letters for maximum ordering flexibility. An item’s order is stored, as a string, in single field called “Rank”. Jira Administrators can see the field on the “Custom Fields” page, but it is “locked” and not editable. Admins might also see remnants of old ranking fields marked “obsolete” too.

Order by Rank with JQL

In addition to viewing item rank on boards, you can also order items by rank with JQL. This is useful for filters and dashboards. To see items in one space, ranked from highest to lowest, use a query like: project = project-name ORDER BY Rank ASC

Troubleshooting

Not able to drag items up or down to rank them? Make sure the filter powering the board contains the clause “ORDER BY Rank ASC“. If it doesn’t there’s an easy way to add it from the board’s setting page in a company-managed Jira Cloud space. On the board’s “Details” page, scroll down and expand the section labeled “Filter details.” Then click the button named “Allow work item ranking”. This will update the filter and turn on the ranking function.

Jira periodically rebalances or “recalculates” item order. The application checks for and handles rebalancing automatically, as a background service. It detects problems like missing minimum or maximum values, strings that are too long, or duplicate ranks in the database. Jira administrators can see the rebalancing status and check for integrity problems from the following page: Admin > System > LexoRank management.

Here’s a screenshot of the LexoRank management page in Jira Server. (The page looks similar in Jira Cloud.)

The middle of the page shows information about the ranking field and its status. In the example, there are 188 ranked items and the rank status is “OK”.

You can manually trigger a rebalance by clicking the “Balance all fields” button or the “Balance field” link. To check ranking integrity, click the “Run integrity checks” button (not pictured) at the bottom of the screen. You can perform these actions without impacting Jira’s availability.

Resources

Use these additional resources to learn more about ranking.

• Read Atlassian’s Documentation: Rank an issue, Enable ranking, and Managing LexoRank
• Watch: JIRA lexorank explained by Ahmad Azfar

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