Why are milestone dependencies not preventing out-of-order completion in my project setup?

Hi Deepti

The dependencies allow the system to schedule your work items in the applicable sequence (provided that you did not manually set start and/or due dates of those milestones) as part of your planning process.

The system however does not prevent you from completing work items (or milestones in your case) before hand. The system will indicate though that you’re off track with the milestone that was due to be completed in the past.

I hope this helped answering your question.

Hi Deepti,

You could write a validation rule to prevent changes to state/percent complete on items that are not yet tagged as “executable.” The Executable field gets updated automatically when all of a work item’s predecessors are complete.

I tried to write a validation rule on work item as below:

Evaluation criteria -

$EntityType = task && $Executable = false && Ischanged($State) && $State =‘Completed’

Message: You can’t complete this item. Make sure all preseasons are completed.

But this validation error is popping up even when I can see a milestone/task is Executable e.g. my first milestone and tasks are executable as they don’t have a predessor.