Apply parent ranking to child records

[Ivan Ribakov]

My use case:

I need to prepare the quarter roadmap for a team. This typically includes 10-15 epics and 50+ stories.

I find Advanced Roadmaps very useful for planning at the epic level first. I do this by ranking all epics by priority and estimating their size in days/weeks.

What I want to do next, is to automatically (with minimal effort) rank the stories based on the epic rank. This is so that the stories can be viewed from a Kanban board and development team could work by always taking the top item from the backlog without second thought.

Let me illustrate what I'm trying to achieve. Given 4 stories belonging to 2 separate epics ordered by story rank:

1. Story1 [Epic1]
2. Story2 [Epic2]
3. Story3 [Epic1]
4. Story4 [Epic2]

after I'm done ordering epics in the following order: Epic1 -> Epic2, I want story rank to reflect that:

1. Story1 [Epic1]
2. Story3 [Epic1]
3. Story2 [Epic2]
4. Story4 [Epic2]

From this article I understand that ranking in Jira works only relative to other records at the same hierarchy level (Epics, Stories, Tasks, etc):

All issues are ranked relative to those with the same hierarchy level, meaning the ranking of an epic won’t impact the ranking of a story

That is fine by me and I can live with that. I also see value in that since in some cases it may be needed to fine-tune some story ranking to alternate between epics based on the available resources, blockers, etc.

Is there some way to "one-time" apply parent ranking to the child ranking?

[John Funk]

Hi Ivan,

No, I am not aware of a way to do that programmatically - only manually. 

[Ivan Ribakov]

So how does Jira suggest people go about organizing big chunks of work if not by starting at the high level and drilling down into lower levels where/when needed?

I've seen that Plans now have a Program Board feature, but what's the value in that if allocating and ordering higher-level issue types does not propagate priority to lower levels, i.e. does not impact the boards that other team members use on a daily basis?

[John Funk]

There are way too many factors involved with how different people order things or expect them to be ordered. Try using Due date or Start date or some other mechanism as such. 

[Ivan Ribakov]

> Try using Due date or Start date or some other mechanism as such. 

But this implies I need to rank every single issue, right? So if I have a 3-level hierarchy (Initiative, Epic, Issue), and there is approximately a x10 factor between each level (10 initiatives, 100 epics, 1K issues), you are saying there is no way quickly rank 1K issues other thank assigning a date to each and every single one and manually reordering them in the Backlog or some other view like that?

[John Funk]

Yes.