See which work is waiting on other work
Two change requests belong to the same regulatory program: Regulatory reporting: claims data extract cannot finish before Unify customer identifiers across policy and claims, the item it depends on in the demo data. Link them as predecessor and successor and the board draws the arrow, and colors it red when the dependent one has run ahead.
Before you start
The two items must be linked with Predecessor / Successor links, and both ends must be returned by the board's query. A dependency pointing at an item the query does not return is not drawn and is not counted on the card.
Steps
- Open the board and stay on the Board tab, because arrows exist there only.
- Look next to a card's state for a small link icon with a number. The number is how many dependency pairs that card takes part in.
- Click the icon, or press Enter or Space while it has focus, to draw that card's arrows. Click it again to hide them; the click never opens the work item.
- To draw every pair on the board at once, select ⋯ (More actions) in the board's command bar, then Dependencies. The entry appears only when the board has at least one dependency pair, and it shows a check mark while it is on.
- Read the direction and the color: each arrow runs from the predecessor to the successor, and turns red when the successor sits in a column further along the process than its predecessor.
What you should see
Curved arrows over the board with an arrowhead at the successor end. They are measured from the actual cards, so they redraw when you scroll inside a column or resize the window, and they disappear for the duration of a drag and come back on drop.
While the identifier work sits in In Review, a column ahead of the extract in In Progress, the arrow is the ordinary gray: nothing is out of order. In the picture below the identifier work is back in Triage while the extract that depends on it stays in In Progress, so the same arrow is red, because dependent work has gotten ahead of its prerequisite.
Notes
An arrow needs both cards actually rendered, so an endpoint hidden by the filter, still behind Show more, inside a collapsed column or lane, or in a removed state drops the arrow silently. "Further along" means the board's own column order, the order you see, which is the state model sorted by category (Proposed → In Progress → Resolved → Completed) unless the board defines its own list of columns, in which case it is that list's order. Either way it is the board's order, not a judgment about dates.