Issues within an Epic must be grouped together in backlog/sprint - want to be able to split them up

Kelly Donovan_1ot9nd

We often work off of team-managed project board, but we now have a team that is working on issues from multiple projects. We have created a board that is not directly tied to one project, but is pulling in issues from multiple projects. Something that is happening on this board (but none of the specific project boards) is that all issues in the same epic are stuck together in the backlog. I cannot split out one story from an epic to prioritize it separately from all the other issues in the epic (ex. 1. Issue from epic A, 2. Issue form epic B, 3. Issue from epic C) - they must all stay grouped together. 

This is how the backlog looks like in this team board: 

 

But if you navigate to the actual project backlog for these issues (the issues above are coming from 2 different projects), they appear like this: 

As you can see here, there are no forced groupings. I am able to prioritize these issues anyway I want regardless of epic. 

How can I stop the backlog from grouping these items together? 

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Kelly Donovan 

The short answer is, you can't.

Boards that you create manually from a saved filter are designed to work with the architecture of a Company Managed project. In a Company Managed project:

- the parent Epic of an issue is recorded in the issue's Epic Link field

- the parent of a sub-task is recorded in the sub-task's Parent field.

In a Team Managed project the Epic Link field is not used. Both the parent issues for sub-tasks and the parent Epics for an issue are recorded in the child's Parent field.

Because of this, when you manually create a board using a saved filter that references Team Managed project issues, the board is seeing the Epic recorded in the Parent field, and making an interpretation that the issue being viewed is like a sub-task.

In agile boards sub-tasks can be prioritized only within the group of their siblings. Sub-tasks can't be prioritized over other higher level issues except when their parent is prioritized.

Team Managed projects are designed to be stand alone and independent. If you have people in a "team" working against issues in separate Team Managed projects, they can't effectively have a singe board for managing all their work across those different Team Managed projects, unless the stories are not children of Epics.