Why is My Parent User Story Not on the Backlog? Why Can't I Schedule It?

Products

• Rally On-Premise
• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Explains how the Rally tool views parent stories, and why they cannot be scheduled into a release or iteration.

Expected Behavior

The Rally tool will react in the following ways when a user story is set as the parent of another story:

• If a child is added to an existing User Story, that story will disappear from the Plan>Backlog page, as well as the Backlog view on the Plan>Plan page.
• When editing a parent User Story, the Iteration and Release fields will be greyed-out, and cannot have values set.
• If a User Story is already assigned to an Iteration or Release, those fields will be cleared out if the story is made a parent.
• If a User Story has tasks assigned to it, those tasks will automatically be moved to the new child story.

 

Cause

Rally reacts this way due to designed behavior, in accordance with Agile methodology. When you create child stories underneath an existing story, you are telling the Rally tool that the scope of work is too large to fit into a single iteration. Multiple child stories are completed during several iterations instead, and when all of the work in the children is complete, the status will roll-up to the parent story.

Since the Backlog is a collection of work that is ready to be scheduled, and parents are too large to schedule, parents do not appear in these locations.

Resolution

Alternatives

If you are trying to denote a theme of work, and do not want to use parent stories, consider these options:

• You may use naming conventions in user stories to link them to a common theme.
  • Example: US123 - [Website Redesign] - Improve functionality in Firefox.
• Tags can also be used to track themes of work across user stories.
  • This option allows you to use the Tagged Story Burndown Report, which provides a graphical view of progress on all tagged stories.