Sort issues (in List view) by the number of issues they are blocking

Release notes

While prioritizing a list of issues in GitLab it's often important to determine the critical path and whether that issue is blocking other issues.

With the current issue list, it is impossible to see which issues are blocking other issues. The only way to do so is to open each one and see the list of blockers below the issue description, which is a very time-consuming task!

With the release of 13.7, you can now use the filter for "Blocked" on any issue list and you will see a new list in descending order of number of blockers.

Problem to solve

This is a follow on to issue #2035 (closed) which is the MVC for blocking issues support

A user should be able to see which issues are blocking the most issues in order to help determine critical path and priorities.

As a product manager, I would like to see which issues block the most other issues so I can better understand how I should prioritize scheduling issues.

As a development team lead, I want to understand which issues block the most other issues so I can ensure my team correctly prioritizes issues within a release.

Intended users

• Parker (Product Manager)
• Delaney (Development Team Lead)
• Sasha (Software Developer)
• Presley (Product Designer)

Proposal

#217569 (closed) adds a count of blocked issues to each issue in the issue list.

When this is done we would like to add a sort option to the existing sort by dropdown menu on issue lists for Blocking, which would allow user to select that as a sort criteria (seen in this design).

Permissions and Security

No additional permissions would be required. User's who don't have access to issues (due to confidentiality) would not see them in the issue list, so additional sorting should not change permission needs.

There are no additional security concerns.

Documentation

Any documentation surrounding sorting would need to be updated to include the new sort option.

Testing

Any test cases which deal with issue sorting would need additional test cases for this new sort option.

What is the type of buyer?

This would be a GitLab Starter feature since it would align with the ability to have blocking issues.

Links / references

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