• Products
  • Documentation
  • Resources

Rank an issue

Rank your issues to organize your team's tasks more effectively. By ranking issues, you actually arrange issues according to their relative importance or urgency. For example, you have two issues that are of 'High' priority. With Jira Software ranking, you can choose which of these two issues have a higher priority or ranking than the other.

When you rank an issue, you also change its relative priority in its current column and swimlane.

To rank an issue: 

  1. Click Projects in the navigation bar and select the relevant project

  2. Navigate to the project's Scrum backlogActive sprintsKanban backlog (if enabled), or Kanban board

  3. Rank an issue by dragging and dropping it to a higher or lower position in the Scrum or Kanban backlog, or in a column in the Active sprints or Kanban board

Ranking an issue in the backlog

Drag and drop an issue to change its ranking in the backlog.

Ranking an issue in Active sprints

Drag and drop an issue to change its ranking in an active sprint.

Important things to note

  • You can only rank issues if ranking has been enabled (see Enabling ranking), and if you have the 'Schedule Issue' and 'Edit Issue' permissions for the issue you want to move.

  • When you move an issue from the Scrum backlog to a sprint, and it's the first issue added to the sprint, the issue will retain its rank. If other issues have already been added to the sprint, the ranking of the issue will be relative to the ranking of the other issues in the sprint.

    In other words: Issues are only re-ranked (upon being moved) when there are other issues to compare them with in the same sprint (or backlog) where they've been moved to. The idea is that rank is managed within a sprint (or backlog) itself, not across sprints.

  • If you're moving an issue from the backlog to an active sprint or your work-in-progress, and your board is using a ranking setting other than ORDER BY Rank ASC, the issue is automatically ranked based on the filter query of your board. (See Enabling ranking for more details.)

  • You can use Keyboard Shortcuts 's' + 'b' to move an issue to the bottom of its current column, or 's' + 't' to move it to the top.

  • You can send multiple issues to the top or bottom of the backlog. Select the issues while holding the 'Shift' or 'Ctrl' key, and then right-click > Top of Backlog or Bottom of Backlog.

  • When you rank an issue that has sub-tasks, all of the sub-tasks are automatically moved with the issue.

  • Sub-task issues can only be ranked in relation to their 'sibling' issues.

Additional Help