This was briefly mentioned in http://studios.thoughtworks.com/discussion/forums/6/topics/497 , but then largely ignored.

It would be very, very useful to have trees actually be acyclic directed graphs (rather than pure trees). There is a very obvious use-case for this, which is scenarios (or process mapping if you prefer).

If I have a card that represents a scenario (or process), it may have many children which are the stories that make up that scenario. But those stories may also be required for implementing a different scenario. So scenarios can have many stories as children, and stories can have many scenarios as parents (many-to-many relationship).

At the moment there is no easy way to do this other than create duplicates of stories or a card tree for each scenario.

Also – this feature would be incredibly helpful for tracking shared scope or dependencies. Often a “task” has to be performed for any of a group of stories – it is a dependency. It will have it’s own estimate of effort and this will be incurred for whatever story is played first.

Being able to have “tasks” that can have multiple stories as parents would provide the ability to track this. Obviously a story can have multiple tasks as children as well – so it is an example of an acyclic graph.

I don’t think this was ignored in the other thread—at least, I hope it wasn’t. Rather, I’m just not sure anyone else had come up with the multiple-parents idea yet. In any case, I’d like to request that we keep all discussion of this in the other thread, so that TW staff can see everything in one place rather than having to look through multiple threads for the same issue.

Well – the other thread seems to be a discussion more on having cycles where cards can have parent/child relationships with other cards of the same type – more a tree rather than a graph. But let’s re-invigorate the discussion there perhaps – so I’ll cross post into there….