[almighty] tl;dr of msdn article on stack rank sparsification

[Michael Kleinhenz]

Thanks, this pretty much sums up the article.

This is also a lesson on the topic how technical design decisions
impact usability and (more important) changeability.

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Thomas Mäder <tmader at redhat.com> wrote:
> tl;dr of
> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2014/05/14/behind-the-scenes-the-backlog-priority-or-stack-rank-field/
> and comments. This is a bit of background on our "backlog ordering"
> discussions.
>
> Please correct mistakes & omissions.
>
> /Thomas
>
>
> Background: TFS has a "stack rank" field to order the project backlog that
> used to be user-editable and stable. They changed that to use
> "sparsification" to create gaps in the ordering so they don't have to change
> large amounts of work items when reordering a single item (O(1) instead of
> O(#work items in backlog) in the worst case)
>
> User complained about that for a couple of reasons.
>
> They used manual stack rank assignment to move items over large distances or
> to specific places. For example moving an item from #200 to #15 by D&D
> requires scrolling, which sucks. Also, the user loses the position in the UI
> (#200). Commands like "move to top of backlog" help, but don't cover all
> cases ("move to #100"). Sparsification uses large ranges, making it hard to
> move things.
>
> They used rank as priority. The "stack rank" must be different for every
> work item in the backlog. Users used the same values for stack rank when two
> work items had the same priority for them. You can argue that you should
> always have an opinion about which among two items is more important, but
> users chose to have a different opinion. Priority is also used to sort items
> into "classes" of importance.
>
> Some people assigned meaning to the stack rank values: for example, "777"
> would have a specific meaning to the product owner. Sparsification would
> change those values and lose the meaning.
>
> Team-local vs project-global stack rank. When reordering items on a team
> backlog, the items would get reordered on the global backlog in
> non-intuitive ways. A related issue is what happens when reordering items in
> a hierarchical view (think stories and child-tasks of them). Would task be
> reordered together with their stories?
>
> Some people complained that anyone on the project could reorder the backlog.
> They wanted to restrict permissions to only some team members.
>
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