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Manage columns on your Kanban board

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Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019 | TFS 2018

The Kanban board helps you visualize your team's workflow, including the types of work and handoffs that occur regularly as your team progresses work items. Each column on your Kanban board corresponds to work that your team does before that stage is considered done.

You can configure and customize your columns to map to your team's workflow stages. Then, you can update status, reassign work, and reorder items to reflect changing priorities.

Screenshot of a Kanban board with customized columns.

Note

To manage columns on a sprint taskboard, see Customize a taskboard. To manage columns on a backlog or in query results, see Change column options.

Note

To add columns to a taskboard, you need to customize the workflow. For more information, see Add or modify a work item type. To add columns to a backlog or query results, see Change column options.

For an overview of the features supported on each backlog and board, see Backlog, board, and plan views.

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 add work items or update fields displayed on cards. For more information, see About access levels.
  • 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

Complete the following tasks, so you don't need to revisit your configuration.

  • 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.
  • Customize your product and portfolio backlogs. Customization ensures that the chosen work item types appear on the backlogs and boards. For more information, see Customize backlogs and boards.
  • Customize workflow states. Each workflow state appears as a column on the Kanban board. For details, see Customize a workflow.

Also, we recommend that you review the following articles:

Map workflow states

The Kanban board uses the Work item type and State categories to group work items that you want handled in the same manner.

  1. Identify your team's workflows. See the following table of example workflows and their descriptions.

    Workflow Description
    Backlog Make a prioritized list of work items that the team isn't yet ready to work on
    Analyze Identify well-understood and shared acceptance criteria, along with overall work required to develop and test the item
    Develop Code and run unit tests for the item
    Test Run exploratory, automated, integration, and other tests
    Done Hand off to production because the item is ready

  2. Know your work item types and on which boards they appear.

    Work item type category Work items appear here
    Requirement Only on the product board
    Feature Only on the Feature portfolio board
    Epic Only on the Epic portfolio board
    Custom Only on a custom portfolio board

    Tip

    We recommend that you map each workflow state to a Kanban column, as if it's not mapped, it doesn't appear on the Kanban board.

  3. Specify the workflow State for each work item type and column, using one of the following four categories.

    State category Description
    Proposed The first Kanban board column is automatically mapped to the default state for each work item
    In Progress Work flow state must be specified for each WIT and column
    Completed Can only map to the last Kanban board column
    Removed Workflow state doesn't need to be specified

Note

Adding bugs or other work items to a Kanban board may create new workflow states, requiring adjustments to column-to-state mappings in the following situations:

Manage columns

Column titles and choices depend on the process that you used to create your project and whether your team has chosen to treat bugs like requirements or like tasks.

Do the following steps to add and edit your columns.

  1. Open your Kanban board.

  2. Select Configure team settings to configure the board and set general team settings.

    Screenshot that shows open board settings for a team in a vertical navigation.

  3. Select Columns and then a column tab to see all the settings that you can modify. Your initial column settings look similar to the settings shown in the following image.

    Screenshot that shows the Settings dialog and selection of an Active column.

  4. Change your column titles to map to your workflow stages. You can add, rename, and move columns to support more stages.

    Rename the first three columns to Backlog, Analyze, and Develop. Then, add a column and label it Test.

    You can rename a column directly from the Kanban board.

    Screenshot showing renaming a column directly on a board.

    Or, you can open the dialog and change one or more settings for a Kanban column.

    Screenshot that shows the Settings dialog and selections for adding a Test column.

  5. To change the column order, drag the column tab to the position that you want.

  6. To delete a column, first make sure that the column doesn't contain any work items. If it does, move the items to another column. Then:

    1. Open Settings, select Columns, and select Actions from the column tab.
    2. Select Remove from the menu.

    Screenshot that shows the selections for deleting a column in the Settings dialog.

  7. Change state mappings as needed for added columns, added workflow states, or added WITs.

    Usually, you need to update state mappings when you change the Working with bugs setting, add WITs to the Requirement category, or customize the workflow.

  8. When you're done with your changes, select Save.

  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. Select Settings to open the common configuration settings dialog for the Kanban board.

    Screenshot that shows the Settings icon on the Kanban board.

  3. Select Columns and then a column tab to see all the settings that you can modify. Your initial column settings look similar to the following example.

    Screenshot that shows column settings in the Settings dialog.

  4. Change your column titles to map to your workflow stages. You can add, rename, and move columns to support more stages.

    Rename the first, second, and third columns to Backlog, Analyze, and Develop. Then, add a column and label it Test.

    You can rename a column directly from the Kanban board.

    Screenshot that shows renaming a column directly on a Kanban board.

    Or, you can open the dialog and change one or more settings for a Kanban column.

    Screenshot that shows the Settings dialog and selections for adding a Test column.

  5. To change the column order, drag the column tab to the position that you want.

  6. To delete a column, first make sure that the column doesn't contain any work items. If it does, move the items to another column. Then, select Actions on the column tab and select Remove from the menu.

    Screenshot that shows the selections for deleting a column in the Settings dialog.

  7. Change state mappings as needed for added columns, added workflow states, or added WITs.

    Usually, you need to update state mappings when you change the Working with bugs setting, add WITs to the Requirement category, or customize the workflow.

  8. When you're done with your changes, select Save.

Update status and handoff items

Drag-and-drop your work items to update the status. For example, to signal when work can start in a downstream stage, drag items to the next column.

Screenshot that shows dragging an item from the Analyze column to the Develop column.

You can move an item from one column to any other column on the board, forward and back. To hand off work to another team member, reassign it directly from the board.

Screenshot that shows assigning an item from a Kanban board.

Team members who receive the handoff can set alerts to get immediate email notifications of their newly assigned work.

Change your team's priorities

Drag an item up or down within a column. Screenshot that shows moving an item within a column.

Track Kanban column status

Use the query tool to list a subset of work items for review, triage, update, or chart generation. For example, you can create a query to list all active user stories (specify two clauses: Work Item Type=User Story and State=Active).

Specify WIP limits, split columns, and definition of done

Do more tasks

In the following table, we've listed tasks and their associated articles, so you can do more with your Kanban board.

Article Task
Interactively filter backlogs, boards, queries, and plans Filter your board to focus on select work based on assignment to a team member or sprint, tags, or parent feature.
Update status Update workflow status through drag-and-drop operations.
Change priorities Reorder cards to change priority of work items.
Customize cards View and quickly assign values to key field.
Track board column status Create queries and charts based on board columns.
View and configure a cumulative flow diagram Review a cumulative flow diagram based on column assignments.