Customize cards on a Kanban board

  • Article

TFS 2018

The Kanban board presents work items in the form of cards, where each card represents a work item that facilitates information sharing, progress tracking, and task assignment. These cards provide quick insights for you and your team. You can update a field on a card without having to open the corresponding work item. You can also apply style rules to highlight specific cards and tasks based on your set criteria.

If you're new to working with the Kanban board, see Kanban overview.

Note

This article addresses customization of a Kanban board. For information on customizing a Taskboard, see Customize sprint Taskboards.

Prerequisites

  • To configure team settings, you must be added to the Team Administrator role or be a member of the Project Administrators security group. To get added, see Add a team administrator or Change project-level permissions.
  • You must be assigned Basic access or higher to exercise all backlog and board features. Users with Stakeholder access can only edit work items on the board and add existing tags to a work item. Stakeholders can't do the following tasks. For more information, see About access levels.
    • Add work items to a board
    • Drag-and-drop work items to update status or reorder cards
    • Update fields displayed on cards

Card customization options

You can show fields on cards based on what your team frequently refers to or updates when using the Kanban board. You can also add fields with information that you can use to filter the board.

Note

You can customize a work item type which is different than customizing the card displayed on the Kanban board. You customize a work item type by adding fields, changing the workflow, adding custom rules and more. You can also add custom work item types and custom backlog levels. For more information, see Customize the On-premises XML process model.

Within the Settings dialog for the Kanban board, you have the following customization options.

Setting Customization action
Fields Add or remove fields from cards.
Styles Add styling rules to change card color and title style based on field criteria.
Tag colors Specify a tag color and enable or disable a tag color.
Annotations Enable or disable annotations to appear on cards.
Tests Configure how you want tests to appear and behave on the cards.
Card reordering Choose expected behavior when reordering cards on the board.

Note

Each team can customize the cards for their Kanban board. Board settings are not inherited from other teams that they may share portions of area paths.

Card customization sequence

Before you configure the cards, make sure the following tasks are complete, or you might need to revisit your configuration.

Process Administrator:

  1. Add custom work item types that you want to appear on your backlog or board. For more information, see Add and manage work item types.
  2. Customize your product and portfolio backlogs to ensure all the work item types you want to have appear on the backlogs and boards. For details see Customize backlogs & boards.
  3. Customize each work item type to have any custom fields you want to show. For more information, see Customize a workflow.

Team Administrator:

  1. Meet with your team and determine how the team wants to manage bugs, similar to requirements or tasks.
  2. Add any tags you want to customize on cards to work items.
  3. Meet with your team and determine which annotations should appear on cards and how they want to configure inline tests.

Open your Kanban board settings

If you're not a team admin, get added as one. Only team and project admins can customize the Kanban board.

You can customize cards that appear on the Kanban board for your product backlog or portfolio backlog such as features and epics. You follow similar steps, however you start from the corresponding portfolio backlog.

  1. Open your Kanban board.

  2. Choose the backlog level you want to customize.

  3. Choose settings icon to open the common configuration settings dialog for the Kanban board.

    Screenshot showing Kanban board, open common configuration settings.

Choose which fields appear on cards

You can edit a card field from the Kanban board, except for read-only fields like the Change By and Changed Date. This quick update feature is useful when you need to update many work items at once.

You can determine which fields appear on each card type. To add a custom field, you must first add it to the work item type definition.

  1. From the board settings page, choose Fields and then a work item type to see all the settings you can modify. Your initial column settings look something like this.

    Here we choose User Story. Your choices vary based on the process used to create your project and whether your team has chosen to treat bugs like requirements or like tasks.

    Screenshot showing Settings,Fields, User Story tab (Agile process).

  2. Enter a check mark in the box next to the fields that you want to have appear on the board.

    If you want work estimates to show, check Show Effort, which corresponds to the following fields: Effort (Scrum), Story Points (Agile), and Size (CMMI).

  3. To add a field, choose the plus icon and enter the name of a field you want to add.

  4. To remove a field, choose the delete icon next to the field.

  5. When you're done, select Save.

Define style rules to highlight cards

With styling rules, you can cause cards to change color when their corresponding work items meet criteria that you set. Here, we highlight severity 1 bugs by having the cards display as yellow.

Screenshot showing styling rule applied to bugs with Severity=1.

Examples of styling rules

Which rules should you apply to highlight work items? Here are a few examples and their associated criteria.

Work items Criteria
High priority items Priority = 1
High effort items Effort 20 or Story Points 20
Stale items unchanged in the last 5 days Changed Date @Today-5
Title contains a key word Title Contains Yes
Severity 1 bugs Severity = 1 - Critical AND Work Item Type = Bug
High value business items Business Value 50
Items assigned to specific feature area Area Path Under Fabrikam Fiber\Phone
Contains specific tag Tags Contain RTM
Blocked tasks (Scrum process only) Blocked = Yes

You can apply style rules to change the color of cards on Kanban boards and Taskboards.

  1. From the Settings dialog, choose Styles to specify a style rule. Choose the plus icon to add a style. Select the color to apply to the card and define the criteria for the style rule.

    In this example, we show the Styles dialog for the dashboard.

    Screenshot showing Settings, Styles dialog.

    Follow these rules when creating and ordering your style rules:

    • The criteria you specify works in a similar fashion as when constructing a query

    • All clauses are considered AND clauses, grouping clauses isn't supported

    • Card rules apply to all work items that meet the rule criteria

    • Rule color applies to work items based on the order in which rules are listed. If you add more than one style rule, make sure that you move them in the order of most importance. Drag them into the order you want them applied.

    • You can quickly enable and disable a style rule.

      Here we add a Stale tasks rule that highlights tasks that haven't changed in the last five days.

      Screenshot showing Taskboard, Style dialog, example style rule.

  2. To copy or delete a style rule, choose the actions icon and select Clone or Delete.

  3. When you're done, choose Save.

Assign tag colors

Before you set tag colors, add tags to backlog items that you want to highlight with color.

  1. From the Settings dialog, select Tag colors, and then + Add tag color. Then, select the tag and the color you want to appear on the cards.

    Screenshot showing Settings, Tag colors dialog (Kanban).

    Tip

    If tags don't display on the cards, select Fields and make sure that you've checked Show Tags.

  2. When you're done, select Save.

Enable or disable annotations

All applicable annotations for the selected board are enabled by default. These annotations include all work item types added to the next level backlog, GitHub, and Tests. Disable any unused annotations or ones that you want to restrict for a specific backlog level.

When you disable an annotation, you also disable the feature to add the associated object from the Kanban board. For example, if you disable the Tests annotation, you disable the ability to add tests from the currently selected Kanban board.

Complete the following steps to manage annotations.

  1. Open the Settings dialog for the Kanban board you want to customize and select Annotations

  2. Check those annotations that you want enabled. For example, to enable tasks but disable tests, check the following boxes.
    Screenshot showing Kanban board, Settings dialog, Annotations tab.

  3. When you're done, select Save.

As shown in the following examples, the Task and Test annotations indicate that two each of tasks and tests are defined for the work item.

Task annotations Test annotations No annotations
Task annotations enabled. Test annotations enabled. Annotations disabled.

For more information, see Add tasks or child items as checklists and Add, run, and update inline tests.

Configure inline tests

You can control the test plan where you create inline tests through the Kanban board. Choose to create a new test plan for each new test that you add or add all new tests to a selected test plan.

  1. Open the Settings dialog for the Kanban board (product backlog only) you want to customize.

  2. Choose Annotations and make sure that Test annotation is enabled, which is a requirement to configure inline tests.

  3. Choose Tests, and then choose the options you want. To select a test plan, choose the actions icon and select one test plan from the query provided.

    Screenshot of Settings dialog, Tests tab (Kanban).

  4. Save your changes.

Open the test plan, test suite from a card

From a card on the Kanban board, you can go to the underlying test plan and test suite under which the tests are created. Choose the open icon to open another browser tab showing Test and associated test plan and test suite that controls the inline tests.

Screenshot showing Test selection from card on board.

Reorder cards

You can drag any work item to any column or swimlane on the Kanban board. You can even change the order of items as you move a card to a new column.

GIF Screenshot showing reordering cards while changing columns.

Note

The last column, typically the Closed or Done column, is always ordered by Closed Date with the most recently closed items appearing towards the top of the column. In all other columns, cards are ordered by the backlog order or they're reordered based on the Card reordering setting selected.

Set the team preference for reordering cards

If you want to preserve the backlog priority when you move a card to a new column, you can change the Kanban board card reordering setting for your team.

  1. Screenshot of an open Kanban board.. If you're not a team admin, get added as one. Only team and project admins can customize the Kanban board.

  2. Choose settings icon to open the common configuration settings dialog for the Kanban board.

    Screenshot showing Kanban board, open common configuration settings.

  3. Choose Card reordering and select from the two reordering behaviors listed.

    Screenshot showing the Settings dialog and Card reordering dialog.

    The setting you choose applies to all active Kanban boards for your team.

  4. When you're done with your changes, choose Save.

    Tip

    You can drag-and-drop work items onto a sprint from any backlog or board. To add sprints to a team backlog, see Define iteration (sprint) paths and configure team iterations.