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There are many presentations that talk about being able to synchronize work between the management and the implementation level in Visual Studio Team Services. That is, a manager can create a set of Epics of Features and the children of those (User Stories or Work Items) will reflect the goals of the project.

However, I could not find a way to re-order parent work items (Features) so that this re-ordering of their Backlog Priority gets updated in the backlog/board that contains children work items (User Stories).

So, my question is: Is it possible to re-order Epics/Features in VSTS and get their children (User Stories) get automatically re-ordered as well?

The only progress that I have done is turning on "Show parents" in the User Story backlog and being able to re-order parent Features in the User Stories backlog. This does not affect the order of the User Stories in their backlog or on the Kanban board.

Martijn Pieters
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Max Weedon
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1 Answers1

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No, it's not supported.

The priority or stack rank reorder only affects on the the Backlog/board of the specific work item type itself. That means you need to separately set the order of Epics/ Features/Stories.

So, if you want to do actions against the child work items based on their Parent order, then as a workaround just as you mentioned, you could "Show parents" in the Parent backlog and Expand the level (click the Plug + icon) to show them. See below screenshot for example.

However the requirement sounds make sense, actually there is a similar User Voice submitted here to suggest the feature, you can go and vote it up to achieve that in future, VSTS team is listening your voice.

enter image description here

Andy Li-MSFT
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