What does it mean: 'order by rank'?

[Andreas Kemper]

Hello everyone.
My question relates to the ranking of issues in the boards.
My customer wants to change the order of his issues in a (Scrum) board manually (via drag&drop). When she tries to do this, she gets an error message. It says that manually changing the order only works if the board is sorted by ranking in ascending order. 
So I changed the board-Filter and now she can do the changes as she wants to.

But what does that mean? What is the value behind 'Rank'?
The Jira documentation says a lot about this. But unfortunately the documentation says nothing about which values are used to sort by 'Rank'.

Can anyone help and make me smarter? :-)

Best regards and have a nice rest of the week
Andreas

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andreas Kemper,

I'm not quite sure what you would like to know. An issue's rank is literally what you can expect it to be: an indicator of its position relative to other issues in the database.

When you export the field to csv, you will see it is displayed as some sort of hash, composed of letters, numbers and special characters. You cannot manipulate the field in the Jira UI in any way other then by - indeed - dragging issues up and down, thus sorting them in the manual order you want to see them in. That's it, basically.

To enable this mechanism in a board, you effectively have to use the field as the only sort order of your board filter. This allows users to use the manual sorting of items on their boards. Any other / additional sorting option on another field (e.g priority or due date) applied to the board filter will overrule that capability.

Hope this helps! 

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andreas Kemper , basically ranking allows you to order issues in your backlog by relative importance with the other issues in the backlog. Here is an article explaining more - rank-an-issue 

[Jack Brickey]

And if interested, Jira uses lexorank for ranking. Here is a good article I came across awhile back speaking to this - lexorank-jira-ranking-system-explained