Documentation for GreenHopper 5.3.x . Documentation for other versions of JIRA Agile is available too.
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GreenHopper allows you to set up rankings for your issues to help you organise tasks in your product/sprint backlog more effectively. Rankings allow you to prioritise issues at a more granular level than issue priorities in JIRA, as rankings can help you to determine whether a single issue is more important/urgent than another single issue. For example, you may have two separate issues which both have a priority of 'Major'. Using GreenHopper, you can assign one of the issues a higher ranking than the other.

Enabling Issue Ranking

Before you can rank issues in your project, your administrator will need to set up a ranking field for the project. This is a custom field that is added to every issue in your project. Whenever you add or edit an issue in your project, you will be able to select a unique ranking value for it in the 'Rank' field.

For information on how to set up a ranking field for your project, please see Configuring your General Project Settings.

(info) A ranking field must be specified for each project in which you wish to rank issues. You can re-use an existing ranking field for multiple projects, if you wish.

Ranking Issues

To rank issues in GreenHopper,

  1. Log into JIRA.
  2. Click the 'Agile' link's down-arrow in the top navigation bar and select 'Planning Board' from the resulting dropdown menu. The 'Planning Board' will be displayed.
    (tick) Tip: The 'Project Overview' mode is ideal for ranking issues.
  3. Select a Context that is sorted by rank (e.g. look for a context named 'Rank'). If one does not exist, you can either create a new context or modify the 'On The Fly' context to sort by the 'Rank' field.
  4. Your issues will be ordered by rank.
  5. You can now rank your issues by dragging and dropping the cards on your Planning Board as desired see below.

Important Information

Please note the following information before ranking your issues:

  • Issue rankings are only applied to the issues that have at least one unreleased fixVersion, or have no fixVersions (ie. are 'Unscheduled').
  • Issue rankings apply project-wide.
  • The ranking field is based on issues that the Project Lead can see. If your security levels hide some issues from the Project Lead, these issues will not be rankable.
  • Sub-tasks can only be ranked within the parent task.
  • 'Clone issue' limitation — GreenHopper currently cannot associate a correct default ranking to sub-tasks when an issue is cloned. The sub-tasks may not be grouped together with the parent issue when you are ranking issues. To fix this, you can either re-rank the parent issue or 'Optimise (repair)' your ranking field.
  • You must associate your ranking field with all issue types within a project.

Dragging and Dropping Cards

You can drag-and-drop one or multiple cards in GreenHopper with your mouse. Just hold down the 'CTRL' key on your keyboard (if selecting multiple issues), click the card header (i.e. the top section of the card, containing the issue key) to select the desired card(s), then drag to the desired destination.

Screenshot:Dragging and dropping a card

You can move an issue(s) between pages by dragging the card(s) up to the pagination controls (e.g. '1', '2', '3', '>>', etc) and then onto your chosen page in the desired location.

Once you have dropped a card in a new location, the other cards are immediately reorganised.

If you drag and drop an issue with sub-tasks, all of the sub-tasks will also be moved together with the parent issue. You cannot drag and drop a parent issue onto a subtask nor a subtask onto a different parent issue.

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