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Sorting in Product Backlog

Hello, trying to understand the sorting in the Product Backlog.

The interface displays columns: Item Number, Description, Iteration, Remaining Work and Business Value/Severity.

I'd like to be able to sort on any of these, is it possible?

That last column is especially confusing - we have gone to some effort to assign meaningful values to Business Value and Severity, but it seems we have no way to sort on this?  I have seen the references to changing the ranking column, but how does that apply to this column when it seems to be operating on different item fields depending on the item type?

Thank you!

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5 Comments

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    Permanently deleted user

    Hi Sean,

    Unfortunately, it is not possible to sort the work items by remaining work or business value. However, it is possible to move them in an iteration and prioritize them there by dragging and dropping them on top of each other. 

    I am not sure I understand the second part of your question. The ranking field is the field where Urban Turtle saves the values that allow the work item to be prioritized i.e. when you sort work items in order of priority by dragging and dropping them. The <Ranking Field="" /> XML parameter in the configuration mapping file allows the data to be saved in any custom field the user could define. It is not possible to make that parameter point to, for example, the 'Business Value' field and have the work items sorted by that value.

    Hope this helps.

    Francis

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    Sean Gifford

    Francis,

    Thank you for the clarification on the ranking field.

    For your suggestion to prioritize by dragging and dropping - this is really just (manually, and tediously, and time-consuming) adjusting the sort field to match the business value, isn't it?  Which means that it will get recalculated and our desired order lost as soon as we insert an item into the list?

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    Permanently deleted user

    Hi Sean,

    I will forward your suggestion to our PO. However, I a m not sure this feature will make it to Urban Turtle because a lot of product owner like to prioritize their stories in relation to both their business value and their complexity.

    But even if Urban Turtle does not have this feature, you can see your stories sorted by business value by entering a query in TFS and generating a report.

    Francis

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    Sean Gifford

    Francis, I may also be confused about how sorting works right now.  If you could provide a link to a resource that describes this in detail I would appreciate it.

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    Permanently deleted user

    I am not a scrum master but here is how I understand it. Business value is not the only criteria by which user stories are prioritized . For example a story might have a high business value but also have a high complexity. The product owner could decide to leave this story for the next iteration and raise the priority on a story that brings less business value but that will be a better fit for the current iteration.  For more details, you can read User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. The first pages of chapter 9 better explain story prioritization than I can.

    You can also read this document my colleague Vincent found on the web.

    Francis

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