TFS Work Items: Stack Rank vs. Priority?

Question

What's the difference between the "Stack Rank" and "Priority" properties on work items in TFS? They seem to have the same function, except that "Stack Rank" is more flexible.

Answer 1

Priority is intended to be a coarse grained property for initial grouping of features (e.g. low, medium, high), what in agile-speak is sometimes referred to as T-Shirt Sizes.

Stack Rank is an individual discrete value (unique within a release) that tells the development team the exact order by which to develop features (user stories). This practice comes from Scrum (in particular) where the Product Owner is in charge of prioritizing the team's work.

The idea behind this (stack ranking) is to force the PO to make hard decisions about the importance of each feature, and move away from "everything is equally important" kind of cop-outs.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Stack Rank: It is just the exact order in which your team will work i.e. Rank 1 is the item on which your team will work first, Rank 2 is the second and so on.

Priority: My team is using it to denote by when something is to be done e.g. Ship Beta when all priority 1 items are done, Enter CERT when all priority 1 & 2 items are done, etc.

In most cases priority and stack rank are aligned i.e. on average higher priority items will be top ranked BUT not always.

Example 1 Let's say PM chooses 3 bugs to fix in the current iteration. 1 is a high priority and 2 are medium priority. Lets assume, fixing one of the medium priority bug means regression testing. so the PM could like to fix it early so that regression effects are visible at the earliest.

Example 2 A higher priority item needs more info before team should start working on it.. so PM would keep its priority high but will move some lower priority item to top rank so that the team can continue working.