Backlog Order Shared?

I think I've found the answer myself. The shared backlog ordering can only be done from the agile board and not the backlog issue list as shown in the marketing material. IMO there might be a lot of confusion around this especially for those that come from using pivotaltracker in the past. Hopefully future versions will bring improvements and polish in this area.

Hello,
To share your order with other users, select a shared saved search or a shared tag as a context (dropdown on the left of the search bar). The order will be associated with this search/tag and other users will be able to see and modify (in case they have a permission) it.
The same way you can choose the search you're using as a backlog from the dropdown.

Best regards,
  Alexander

It will preserve the order associated with the search. However, it will not preserve the order of issues that have been dragged and manually ordered between the search results (hence the pivotal tracker reference). This is the primary way our users expect to manage the backlog while talking with stakeholders. Asking questions like "Is this higher priority than this? Okay, let's move it ahead." If you order the backlog while viewing the board, that order is preserved in the search result for the "Project Backlog" search result, but is a clunky interaction and screams for more space.

After joining a company that uses YouTrack after using VersionOne, Rally, and FeaturePlan elsewhere, I found the team was having difficulty communicating priorities successfully using the tool, and had given up and resorted to using email and spreadsheets out-of-band.  To me, this is a sure sign that the tool is not serving their needs.

On analysis, what I found was this:

If a user clicks on a Saved Search=X with Context=Everything, and reorders the backlog, this prioritization is INDEPENDENT of the order when a user uses Context=X with no search. If the user reorders the backlog from a Kanban board configured to use Saved Search=X, this ordering is shared with the case with Context=X and no search.

So the reason the teams could not figure out what order the PO had selected was that the PO was using Contexts and Kanban boards while ordering the backlog, but the teams were clicking on Saved Searches to view the backlog.

As a new PO, it took my manager and I quite some time to figure out why we had completely different ideas what the priorities were on our project.

Adding to the problem, the orderings are independent without any way for the user to be able to identify it: since the priorities from drag and drop are not crystallized in a visible value (like, say, a number visible to the user), there is no evidence to the SMs that the backlog they are seeing when they click on Saved Search=X is not ordered the same way as the backlog the PO is seeing when they use Context=X or the Kanban board.

This has been highly disruptive to our teams.  If there was one main reason I would advocate to drop YouTrack and switch tools, it would be this.

Is there some logical reason I don't understand why these orderings would be independent?

It would be such a relief to have this fixed.  It would make YouTrack a tool rather than an impediment for our teams.

Is there a response to this?  I also can't seem to order the scrum backlog, even with my own context.

Thanks in advance,

Anthony

 

Hi Anthony,

In the context selector on the issue list (to the right of the search bar), please select the saved search that is used on your board as a backlog. Please let me know if it helps.

 

Regards,

  Alexander