VSTS: Kanban board hides converted Work Items

Question

I have a strange issue with Kanban board in VSTS (Web). We use a customized process from Agile. Our Product Owners sometimes change the work item types (for instance change a Bug to a User Story).

Our Kanban board strangely hides the work items which their type has been changed. However, They are still visible in Backlog.

I have checked the filters to make sure the items are not filtered. The hidden User Stories look pretty normal when we display the details; we can even change the older in backlog. It seems when the type conversion happens some sort of hidden field gets messed up which makes Kanban fail identifying it as Backlog Item.

Any idea or similar experience?

Marina Liu Marina Liu · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-20T03:08:15

Kanban board only shows the children use story. Assume you have work items structure like:

UserStory1 (parent)
      |___ task1 (children)
      |___ bug1  (children)

So you can find UserStory1 in Kanban board. But if you change bug1 to UserStory2, you will only find UserStory2 in Kanban board.

UserStory1 (parent)
      |___ task1      (children)
      |___ Userstory2 (children)

This is because VSTS designed for the hierarchy like:

Epics
  |___ Features      
           |___ Stories
                   |___ Tasks
                   |___ Bugs

This is by design due to reordering issues encountered when same work item type parent-child relationships appear on a single board together. Our recommendation is to use the work item hierarchy for parent-child relationships (for example, Feature (parent) to a User Story (child). Leveraging WIT hierarchy for relationships will also enable the Checklists feature https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/kanban/add-task-checklists that provides a quick breakdown of work items into child items.

You can find similar issue in developercommunity.

So you can recommend the Product Owners to delete the parent userstory (UserStory1) in the child UserStory2 modification page after him/her change a bug to user story.

So the structure will be:

UserStory1 (parent)
      |___ task1 (children)
Userstory2

VSTS: Kanban board hides converted Work Items

1 Answers