Intended relationship between PBI Structure and the Product Backlog in MSF Scrum 2.2 for TFS 2012?

Question

As my scrum team does backlog grooming, we typically start with epic-level work, and refine those PBIs into themes and stories as part of normal grooming activities. As a means of structuring these work items, the PBIs that result from refining and clarifying other PBIs are created as child links of the larger items. We implement this process by assigning only sprintable stories to sprints, while leaving their parent theme PBIs in the current release iteration.

We've been slowly growing into the features provided by 2012 after an upgrade earlier this year, and the ability to drag items around in the Product Backlog view in Web Access (rather than manually tweaking priority values) is extremely attractive.

We'd like to use this, but there's a problem: PBIs that have a parent-child relationship, as do most of our planned work, can't be dragged around individually. Instead, each epic appears as a tree in the product backlog, enumerating its children with its own priority range of [1..1000000], and it drags around atomically.

With this in mind, how is this supposed to work? Am I missing something about the features of the Product Backlog view? Are we intended to be destroying our epics and themes as they're refined into smaller PBIs, so that the stories can be scheduled independently?

Answer 1

We've been struggling with the same type of issue. We decided to remove epics and only use stories. Then we tag each PBI with an epic name so that we can easily search and group items when necessary. Haven't really found any better option yet.