azure board prioritisation not cascading to linked items

Question

Im venturing in the world of devops and seem to be falling at the first hurdle here. Looking at Azure DevOps and specifically Azure Boards, but I can't seem to get things working as I expect. Trying to follow the Agile process and have created 10 dummy epics, each with around 5 features and then 10 associated user stories.

My problem is that if I refine my EPICs to an order I want to work on them, the order of the features doesnt change, is this normal behaviour? or have I messed something up in my confguration? I tried to plan based on features (which is where I prefer to plan), but again moving them in the backlog doesnt move the priority of their associated user stories or seem to have an impact on the backlog order.

Is this my lack of understanding or something I've gotten wrong in the configuration?

I've followed the MS guidance for this, but seem to be missing in my understanding. If anyone has any pointers on what I might be doing wrong it would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The order of Features or User stories will not inherit the order of their parent in backlog.

There is no configuration to set this.

You could try to create your own query to implement such a feature.

Answer 2

The behavior is correct.

The sequence of items on each backlog is determined according to where you've added the items or moved the items on the page, not the parent work item order.

To reorder your backlog, you can drag the work items within the backlog list ,not drag parent work items, for example, if you would like to reorder feature, check feature backlog, and simply drag for the new order. And same for user stories order.

When you drag items within the backlog list, a background process updates the Stack Rank (Agile and CMMI processes) or Backlog Priority (Scrum process) fields. The value is used by the system to track the relative ranking of items**. For example, for feature backlog page, you can add a column named Stack Rank, it's ordered by the value:

In addition, the order in backlog will reflect on Boards and vice versa.

Check the Boards setting, it has two types setting below, if you drag work items on boards it will also update the stack rank value, and change the order on backlog page. So if you don't want to change the work items order from boards, need to choose 2nd option Work items follow the backlog order when changing columns.

If you would like to edit one of the backlog order fields in bulk to get a large number of work items in the priority order you want, use Excel. You can export a query containing the backlog items, update either the Backlog Priority or Stack Rank fields, and then publish your changes.

More details on official doc below:

Reorder your backlog

Backlog priority or stack rank order