How to maintain order of stories by date/time of completion

[Cindy Daugherty]

We would like to maintain the order of our "Done" column by the date and time that the story was complete, with the most recent on top.  I have not been able to find anything that indicates this is possible.   We do not want the rest of the columns to be changed.  (Jira seems to change the position to original priority.)

Is this possible?   Thank you.

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Cindy - a couple of suggestions, although I will be up front and say you probably can't get what you want. 

First, how long do issues stay in your Done column? Are you doing frequent releases? So, I guess the question is, why would you need them to be in a certain order in the Done column?

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you might could create another board that exists just for the purpose of showing the order of the Done column. You could accomplish that by copying the existing board and using a different field that adds an ORDER BY RESOLVED DESC.  But that will affect all of the other columns, too, in that you will not be able to change the priority/sort in the columns. Or the new board could just have one column - the Done column.  :-)

[Derek Fields (RightStar)]

Agree with @John Funk - to extend on the explanation, the order in which the issues are displayed is determined by the filter that is used to select the issues. You cannot have a different order for each column. 

I agree also that it is not clear what value there is in seeing the order in which issues were completed on the board. If you need that information for analysis, you can do it through a filter or report to show that when you need it.

[Cindy Daugherty]

Thank you both John and Derek.  Our team finds it confusing when we hold stand-up and our "completed" stories have changed order. It is simply an ease of use issue. 

We are going to change the frequency of our sprints so this may become less of an issue.  However, we have had some sprints which there has been a large number of stories completed.   I appreciate your suggestions.  I am not sure that creating another view wouldn't add to the confusion.  It sounds like a column sort feature would be a nice to have so that the other columns aren't affected as well.

[John Funk]

I imagine many teams use an additional board for Stand Ups. We always have a Quick Filter that says Hide Done, which is used to hide the completed issues in the Done column. You could click on that for discussing non-Done issues. Then quickly change to the alternative board for looking at completed stuff. 

Just another suggestion.  :-)

If that's all we can do for you, can you click on the Accept answer button above so we can close this one out? Thanks!

[K B]

We need this too. 
The reason this is helpful, and I think sensible, is that while issues are live, or at least before they hit 'in progress' the rank is what is important, since it guides what is next to be done. 
during in progress, it's pretty much irrelevant and there's probably an argument to sort by (last edited) or (when it was transferred to in progress). Those have meaning which can be useful in keeping the team on track 
For Done, rank won't make any sense, mainly because what are tehy being ranked for??? In addition, items which have been ranked during the to do process at different times will have relative rankings which won't have any meaning. 

In Done, sorting by due date gives you a good snapshot of the most recently completed tasks. Which is useful on an ongoing basis to keep an eye on what's making progress.
Just my twopenneth.

[Igor 2S]

Hi, I had the same need in Jira Cloud, and for me sorting/order by multiple fields solved this. I updated the board search query to following:

project = <NAME> ORDER BY resolutiondate DESC, Rank ASC

Since all issues with Resolution set are sorted first, the Done column is sorted as intended, while the other columns still preserve order by Rank.

However, the Ranking as a feature gets disabled for the specific board, since Jira requires search query to only be ordered by ranking, for it to function correctly.

I hope this helps others in same position.

[Johan Radivoj]

Thank you for sharing, this change resolved my use case.

[Mike P]

I agree with Cindy's request as well.  During standup our team would like to see the most recently completed stories in order in the done column.  This is so team members can talk about what they completed the day before.

[André Tzermias]

I agree this is an actual issue that teams encounter. We use a kanban board and the DONE column displays things that were recently deployed. However since jira shows items on the done column that were edited in the last 15 days, and since our team has a good through put there are quite a few items that are in the Done column. Being able to sort at least this one by date resolved or date last updated would be helpful.

[Blake Bishop]

To generalize: It would be great to be able to independently order the individual swimlanes on a Scrum or Kanban board.