Ranking Kanban board when tickets have sub tasks

[Chuck Oleary]

- I have a Kanban board and the stories have sub tasks. 
- I have the board swim lanes set to 'Stories'

For stories without sub tasks I can move the cards up and sown in rank and they appear in the 'Other Issues' swim lane. 
Once I add sub tasks the stories move to the swim lane above 'Other Issues' and can no longer be ranked, but the subtasks can be ranked.

My question is how can I rans the stories with sub tasks?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Chuck Oleary 

You have to disable the Swimlanes by Stories in order to be able to change the rank of stories on the board. Or, you could create a separate board for the same issues and not have swimlanes on that board, and rank the stories there.

Ranking is a global value, so changing the rank of an issue in one board will impact where it appears ranked in all other boards.

[Chuck Oleary]

Thanks for the input Trudy,

Keeping 2 different boards seems like a hack work around and that there is something wrong here.
Stories ranks just fine on the board using the Stories swim lane until I add sub tasks, then ranking those stories go out the window.

So if I want to use swim lanes by stories I appears I have 4 options.
- Stop using the swim lane by Stories feature in Jira
- Stop using the sub task feature in Jira
- create a separate Jira Kanban board and use that just for ranking
- find a better product to manage my Kanban project

[Trudy Claspill]

Another option is to enable the Backlog screen and rank the issues there. But that eliminates the the first column of your board (if you are using Company Managed projects), and doesn't show all the issues in all columns of the board.

I found a change request for this which Atlassian has indicated they won't implement:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-13401

I found another newer change request that seems like it might be the same, and has not been closed.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-18815

[Chuck Oleary]

I look at JSWCLOUD-18815 and the workaround kind of works, but once I add a sub task to any story I lose the ability to right click and select move it to the Top or Bottom of the swimlane.

---

In a good agile practice as stories are refined sub tasks are added.  Sub Tasks like code, review, refactor, refactor automation, manual test etc.  This allows many people to swarm on a story. 
Once refined and the scope of the work is defined that's when ranking matters.  Teams need to be able to EASILY recognize the next-most important ticket to pick up from the board.  
And once in a ranked order the ability to re-rank is paramount.  Clients change there mind, something becomes more important all the time.

Maybe I should be asking this:  Once a sub-task is added to story and it moves out of the "other" swimlane what dictates the ranking of stories?

[Trudy Claspill]

The swimlanes (set to Stories) will be ordered relative to each other by their Rank.

Unfortunately, the stories with no subtasks do appear in the "other" swimlane. Within the "other" swimlane the stories there are also ordered by their Rank.

If you add a subtask to one of those stories such that it becomes a swimlane, then that new swimlane will be ordered among the other swimlanes based on the Rank of the story compared to the Rank of the other stories that have swimlanes.

This doesn't seem ideal. I recommend that you reach out to Atlassian Support directly to see if they might be able to provide additional guidance, work arounds, or insights to backlog issues they may have on this topic.

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/