Automatic Children Docs

Welcome to the documentation for the Automatic Children Azure DevOps extension.

Automatic Children helps you automatically create child work items in Azure DevOps with just a few clicks. Instead of manually creating Tasks, User Stories, or other work items one by one, you set up rules once and the extension takes care of the rest — right from a work item’s context menu.

You define what kind of parent work item should trigger the action, what conditions need to be met, and what child work items to create. You can even pull values from the parent (like its title, assigned person, or area path) so everything stays connected and consistent.

The extension is built around two core features:

• General Rules — Define what child work items to create and under what conditions. For example, “When I run this on a User Story, create a Design Task, a Development Task, and a Testing Task.”
• Cascades — Chain multiple general rules together to create multi-level hierarchies in one go. For example, “When I run this on an Epic, create Features, then create User Stories under each Feature, then create Tasks under each User Story.”

Where to go

• Getting Started — Install the extension, set up your license, and create your first general rule.
• Concepts — Deep-dive into general rules, cascades, multi-select work items, placeholders, and licensing.
• Examples — Real-world examples you can recreate in your own projects.
• Support — How to report bugs, request features, and get in touch.