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Build a board of everything under an epic

The Payments platform epic spans four teams. The stories under it live in different area paths, different iterations, sometimes different projects. The question, "show me every story under this epic, as a board", has no native answer: board membership comes from a team's area paths, never from a hierarchy, and the native board's Parent filter reaches exactly one level up.

This is the case AnyKanban was built for, and it takes four steps and no query.

Build it

1. New board, then pick Everything under one item from the gallery.
2. Type the epic's id, or part of its title, and choose it from the hits. An item in another project works: an id search is not scoped to one.
3. Under Cards are, choose the level that becomes the cards. On a Scrum process that is Product Backlog Item; on Agile, User Story.
4. Read the line above the button, which says how many items are under that root right now, and select Create board.

That is all. AnyKanban writes the recursive tree query for you, and the board carries that query itself: nothing is saved into your Queries, so you need no permission on any folder.

What you get

• The whole subtree, at any depth. A story three levels below the epic arrives exactly like a direct child.
• One level on the wall. The epic itself, the features between it and your stories, and the tasks below them are the tree's structure. The board counts them and says so above the columns. It never shows them as cards and never drops them silently.
• Backlog order across every parent. Cards sort by the backlog's own rank, so the board reads the way the backlog does, and by default that rank is read-only here: no drag on this board rewrites a product owner's prioritization unless someone turns on Reorder from this board in the board's settings, a choice Why we never write to your backlog explains.
• Nothing frozen. Move a story under a different feature in the same epic and it stays; move it out of the epic entirely and it leaves on the next refresh.

Reopening the board's settings names the item it was built from, as Everything under Epic 1234 · Payments platform, with the query itself below it.

When you want the query instead

The card covers one root and the hierarchy beneath it. Write the query by hand when you want something the card does not offer:

• several roots at once, say two epics on one board;
• a shared, editable query other people can iterate on;
• extra clauses, such as excluding a state or an area path.

The query, if you write it by hand:

SELECT [System.Id], [System.Title], [System.State]
FROM workItemLinks
WHERE ([Source].[System.Id] = 1234)
  AND ([System.Links.LinkType] = 'System.LinkTypes.Hierarchy-Forward')
MODE (Recursive)

Replace 1234 with your epic's id; for several roots use [Source].[System.Id] IN (1234, 5678). Save it as a Tree of work items query and put it on a named board. Any template's query can also be edited under Advanced before you create the board. Azure DevOps checks it as you type, and a query it refuses cannot be saved.

If something looks wrong