The story tree works bottom up. This means that work can only be performed against the lowest level item in any epic story tree. It also means that no story that has a child story can be moved into an iteration or have work performed against it, and that once a story has been moved into an iteration, or has been completed, it can’t have any children.
The points value for any parent is the sum of the points value for all stories that can have work performed against them. Some view this as backwards, but it does provide a more accurate view of the size of an epic piece of work.
What this means is that you have to be very careful when dragging and dropping things about using the tree view. If you accidentally make a story a parent (You do receive a big warning though), and then remove all its children, it will have a size of zero. Probably not what you wanted!
The status of child stories are rolled up into their parent as are their points values.
In the example above those cards with ‘White’ handles are Epics and cannot have work performed against them. As you can see epics can have children that are themselves epics with children
To access the epic view or story/ hierarchy:
• use the project tree view from the main menu to see the entire project in a hierarchy
• In any list, where a story has a parent, a link to the parent showing the parent story number as well as the parent size is provided (A tooltip shows the parent summary text). When selected, this presents a tree with the epic story as the root of the tree.
• How the current iteration/backlog fits into the product can be accessed from the ‘Iterations’ drop-down menu. Selecting the tree view here, presents a view showing the parents and their children, for all stories in the iteration. Current stories are highlighted with a blue border. (Epics that this iteration does not touch are NOT displayed)
To make a story a child of another, either:
1. Enter the Epic view for either the Project or iteration and Drag and drop using the project or iteration/Backlog epic /tree view
2. Select the parent story from the list of current parents in the dropdown on the story edit page
3. Type the parent id in the box to the left of the parent dropdown (not much validation, so take care)
You can do this to an almost unlimited level, but don’t get carried away.
Projects Epics are independently ordered and do not change the order of the work in the backlog or iteration. The status of the child stories are rolled up into their parent as are the points values.
Drag and drop stories to create the hierarchy and order you need.
An Epic does not have a status of its own, rather it accumulates the status and size of all its children. A tooltip indicating the size for each parent status value is presented as a reminder
eg. Epic #4 comprises 2 done stories totalling 5+1=6 points.
Epic #26 comprises stories with a mix of status values and size.