There are 2 ways of ordering your search results in the issue navigator within JIRA. You can click on the column header to sort the issues or you can use the “Order By” clause via JQL (JIRA Query Language). A JQL example would be “project = demo ORDER BY Assignee ASC”
However, if you want to order by status (Open, Close, In Progress), the results may surprise you. Clicking on the column heading “status”, this is what you’ll see.
Intuitively you would expect Closed to be at the top, then Done, then In Progress etc but it doesn’t work like this. The order is actually determined by it’s position in the Administration area where the statuses are defined.
Lost? Try this: Go to Administration -> Issues -> Statuses. There you will see a list of all your statuses. Note the order. I’ve provided a screenshot below where Open is at the top, In Progress comes next and so on.
There is a column where you can re-order the statuses which is neat but the drawback is what if you have lots of statuses? That’s a lot of clicking.
If you are interested in more background reading check out this JIRA issue where there are lots of discussions: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5189
This is interesting read as well: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/How+to+re-order+statuses
