Work management

Why did that happen?

The refusals and the automatic changes, collected — most are deliberate, and each says which rule it came from.

This product refuses more than most, and changes some things on its own. Both are deliberate: a guard that fires is one that stopped a record becoming untrue. Here is every one you are likely to meet, and where the reasoning lives.

Something changed and nobody changed it

An item shows a blocked badge that nobody set: Blocked is derived, never stored. It appears because something linked as blocking it is unfinished, and it disappears the moment that finishes — with no write and nothing to remember. The item keeps whatever state it was in. See Blocking.
An item was assigned, moved or labelled by itself: An automation rule fired. Every firing is recorded with what it did — Settings, then Automation, then the run log. Changes made by a rule are attributed to the rule, not to whoever triggered it.
A start or completion date appeared: Moving an item into an in-progress state stamps when it started; moving it into a done state stamps when it completed, and moving it back out clears that. Derived from the transition rather than typed, so cycle-time figures cannot disagree with the board.
You are watching something you never subscribed to: Reporting it, being assigned it, commenting on it or being mentioned all subscribe you. Stop watching once and nothing implicit will put you back. See Comments, mentions and watching.
A name in an old comment changed: A mention stores who, not the text of their name, so a rename updates every past mention of that person. A mention of somebody who has left keeps what was typed.

It will not let me do this

What you tried	Why	What to do
Move an item into a sprint	The item's project follows a different cadence. Ranks and sprints are only comparable within one.	Move the project to that team, or use that project's own cadence. See Cadences.
Change the state of released work	The release has shipped and its contents are frozen. Otherwise a version claims work that never went out.	Reopen the release, or move the item out of it first. See Releases.
Ship a release with unfinished work in it	Refused, and the refusal names the items.	Move them to the next release or detach them — that is what shipping is.
Change a custom field's type or key	Values live in the form the old type stored, and saved views filter on the key.	Rename the label instead, which is always allowed, or create a new field. See Labels, fields and attachments.
Remove a choice from a select field	Somebody has already picked it, and removing it would blank their field with nothing recording what it held.	Leave it, or clear it from those items first.
Delete a work item type or workflow state	Work is using it.	Deactivate it instead — it drops out of the pickers and existing work keeps meaning what it meant.
Make an item its own ancestor	A loop makes every tree walk run forever, which shows up as a page that hangs rather than an error.	Pick a different parent.
Put a parent below its child in the hierarchy	It would say an epic is inside a subtask.	Nesting two things of the same level is fine — only inverting is refused.
Edit or delete a time entry	It has been picked up by an invoice run and is immutable.	Record a correcting entry, exactly as the leave ledger posts a reversal.
Save an automation rule	It reacts to the thing it changes, or a condition has nothing chosen.	Split it into two rules, or fill the condition in. See Automation.

It did some of what I asked

A bulk edit applies what it can and names every refusal. That is deliberate: refusing all fifty items because one broke a rule leaves you bisecting the selection by hand. What never happens is a silent skip — if an item was not changed, it is in the list with the reason.

A figure looks wrong

The burndown starts higher than we committed to: Scope is drawn as its own line and rises when work is added mid-sprint. The ideal line stays anchored to the commitment snapshotted at the start, which is why it does not move with it.
Velocity looks low: Check whether a sprint in flight is being read. It is drawn faded and excluded from the average precisely because including it halves the figure on a two-week cadence.
Somebody shows almost no load: Look for the +n beside the cell — that counts items with no estimate, which carry no minutes. See Estimates.
Cycle time and lead time disagree wildly: They measure different things and the gap between them is the point: lead time includes every day an item sat in a backlog nobody looked at. See Cycle time.
A search result seems irrelevant: It matched a description, a comment or a filename, and the snippet shows which. A result with no visible reason is dropped rather than shown.

A saved view opened showing more than it should

A view naming something since deleted still opens, drops the dead filters, and says how many it dropped. One that silently returned nothing would look like a bug, and one that errored could not be repaired from the screen it broke on. Re-add the filters you want and save it again.

Still unexplained?

The item's activity trail records every field change with what moved, from what, to what and by whom — including the ones automation made. It is on the item itself, under the comments.