The forward order assumption postulates that the ranking process of the items is carried out by sequentially assigning the positions from the top (most-liked) to the bottom (least-liked) alternative. This assumption has been recently relaxed with the Extended Plackett-Luce model (EPL) through the introduction of the discrete reference order parameter, describing the rank attribution path... By starting from two formal properties of the EPL, the former related to the inverse ordering of the item probabilities at the first and last stage of the ranking process and the latter well-known as independence of irrelevant alternatives (or Luce's choice axiom), we derive novel diagnostic tools for testing the appropriateness of the EPL assumption as the actual sampling distribution of the observed rankings. Besides contributing to fill the gap of goodness-of-fit methods for the family of multistage models, we also show how one of the two statistics can be conveniently exploited to construct a heuristic method, that surrogates the maximum likelihood approach for inferring the underlying reference order parameter. The relative performance of the proposals compared with more conventional approaches is illustrated by means of extensive simulation studies. (read more)