Move work
Changing state and changing order, with a mouse, without one, and when the process says no.
Pages
- Move an item to the next state: drag a card into another column. The board writes the state, and the column counts follow immediately.
- Put a column in priority order: drag a card up or down inside its column. The new position is written to the rank field, so the board, the List view and the query itself agree on the order.
- Move a card without dragging: the card's right-click menu, with Move to top, Move to bottom, Move to position…, and one Move to entry per other column. Two clicks reach a column at the far end of a wide board, or an exact place in the card's own column.
- Move a card with the keyboard alone: pick up, move and drop a card from the keyboard, with the announcements a screen reader reads out.
- Put the backlog in the order of its requests: Take priorities on a board of backlog items moves the items that sit out of the order of their own requests, on every level from the epics down to the requirements, after a preview that lists every change. With The whole hierarchy chosen it reorders every level from the top, so items without a request of their own move too: they follow the item above them, or go after the items that have a request.
What every move has in common
One condition switches dragging off everywhere on the board: an As of snapshot, which is read-only end to end. A filter does not. With cards hidden, a drop lands by one fixed rule: directly above the visible card below the slot, after every hidden card between them, or directly below the last visible card when you drop at the bottom. Hidden cards keep their own places, and the order you see afterwards is the order you arranged. See Order a column by priority.
Every move is written optimistically: the card lands where you put it before the server has answered, and the write carries a test on the work item's revision. If someone changed the item first, the board re-reads it and retries once. If the change cannot be applied at all, the card returns to where the server says it belongs and a message explains why. A failed move is never silent.
Take priorities works the other way round, because it moves many items at once and most of them are not cards on the board. Nothing moves until you have read its preview and pressed Apply, Azure DevOps checks every write before the first one is made, and the run stops at the first item that changed rather than retrying it. The board shows the new order on its next refresh.
Related
- User Guide: the whole product in one page
- Prerequisites: the order field that manual ordering needs