Prioritising tickets by the number of watchers

[Karolis]

Hi. My team is thinking about prioritizing tickets based on the number of their watchers.

Questions:

1. Is there a way to automatically change the ticket's priority based on the number of watchers?
2. Is there a way to perform some sort of a search (or sorting) that would list out tickets in our project based on the number of their watchers?
3. Is there a way to display the number of watchers of every ticket in the backlog view? Just like story point are displayed at the moment.

Thank you.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Karolis,

Watchers is just a column you can display in search results of any filter and that you can sort by.

I tend to agree with @Ismael Jimoh that votes may be a more significant metric to prioritise requests by, technically you can perfectly order the list of your requests by either watchers or votes. In the example below I created a random search, added the Votes and Watchers columns to the results view in the issue navigator and then clicked the Watchers column title to sort the results:

It would work in exactly the same way for Votes, obviously. 

[Karolis]

Thank you @Walter Buggenhout, your answer works for me perfectly.

[Ismael Jimoh]

Hi @Karolis 

Here, I would likely rather go with the vote field as this can be used to order as you described the number of people interested in a ticket.

I am not sure how you could implement the change in priority however, you can try automation for Jira as such(this is not yet tested):

1. When: issue updated
2. If: JQL filter: Votes more than a certain number 
3. The: Edit Issue: Set priority field to the value you want.

Once again, I haven’t tested the above but that is how I swill build such a logic.

Why votes and not watchers, I believe watchers is more akin to a multi user picker field whereas Votes is a counter field where for each person who votes on a ticket, it goes up by one fitting your goal.

Cheers.

[Karolis]

Cheers @Ismael Jimoh. At the moment we'll stick to a simple search with the ability to sort the tickets by watchers (and votes).