Reorder cards on your Kanban board

TFS 2017 | TFS 2015

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.

Reorder cards while changing columns

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.

Prerequisites

  • You must have a Kanban board you want to configure. When you add a team, you add a Kanban board for that team. To learn more, see About teams and Agile tools.
  • 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.
  • Users assigned Basic access or higher can exercise all backlog and board features.
  • Users assigned Stakeholder access have limited access to backlog and board features. Stakeholders can edit work items on the board and add existing tags to a work item. They can't add work items to a board, can't drag-and-drop work items to update status or reorder cards, and can't update fields displayed on cards. For details, see About access levels.

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. Open your 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.

    Kanban board, open common configuration settings

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

    Settings dialog, Card reordering dialog

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

  4. When 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.