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You can’t stack rank hierarchical work items?

Explains why stack ranking hierarchical work items is challenging in agile software development, highlighting issues with ordering, parent-child links, and best practices.

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At the MVP Summit I was appalled by the number of people who asked questions about new features for supporting hierarchical tasks! I shared a disgusted look with Peter Provost and we had a quick (and I mean really quick) conversation that resulted in this post. it really comes down to one thing:

You can’t stack rank hierarchical work items?

If you want to continue to be competitive in the world of modern software development you need to be able to effectively order (stack rank) a list of well understood items. This could be at the PBI (or Product Backlog) level or it could be at the Task (or Sprint Backlog) level but I need to be able to do that ordering by moving things about… how do I do that with a tree?

You can't stack rank hierarchical work items?

Figure: How do you order a tree?

No really! Lets look at a couple of specific questions:

This has to be the expected out come because of that pesky parent / child relationship.

So what is the expected behaviour when you discover a PBI that is too large (for whatever reason) and you want to break it down into two smaller ones. Once you have broken a PBI down into two smaller ones that encompass all of the things we need to make the larger one what purpous does it solve… have we not just replaced it? Well then, lets remove it.

You can't stack rank hierarchical work items?

Figure: You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? Good example, Mark the parent story as removed

This only makes sense as I have all of the relevant information in the two new PBI’s.

You can't stack rank hierarchical work items?

Figure: Now I have no “PBI 3”

If I look at the history for that “removed” PBI I can, and I will, be able to see all of the history including that the links to the children still exist. This means that you can still query and see what those relationships were without them interfering with the backlog any more.

You can't stack rank hierarchical work items?

Figure: I can still have my tractability

Let me jus say that I am not suggesting that you do not use linking, there are many links that are and should be available. Which of those links are good to use,  provide value and make sense  for both the team and your product owners:

  1. **Tasks with a Parent / Child relationship with a PBI
    **
    You need for your team to be able to keep track of the work that they are doing to achieve a single PBI and this is that. There are other options, but this is the best one. You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? **Figure: You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? Good example, You can have Task as a child of **
    You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? Figure: You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? Bad example, do not use PBI’s as children of other PBI’s

I a using the Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 template (default) so while you can make things more complicated, this is about as complex and the expected common cause use cases go with Work Items. There are other artefacts links to support things like Test Results, Code Reviews, Feedback Results and others, but they are tool bits not really that user configurable.

You can't stack rank hierarchical work items?

Figure: You can't stack rank hierarchical work items? Bad example, nesting Work Items is very unwieldy

I am always interested in finding out what other scenarios there are out there:

Do you agree?

What reasons do you have for using hierarchy’s?

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