Customize cards on a Kanban board

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

The Kanban board offers an extensive range of tools and customization options. It 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 are information-rich and provide quick insights for you and your team. Moreover, 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.

When you enable annotations, you gain quick access to linked work items and other features. If you're new to working with the Kanban board, see Kanban basics.

In the following card, these options are set for the bug work item type:

• Show all core fields: ID, Assigned To, Story Points, Tags

• Show three more fields: State, Changed By, and Changed Date

• Apply tag colors

• Apply styling rule to display bugs with Severity=1 as yellow and bold and underline the Title field

• Enable Task, GitHub, and Test annotations

  

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

Card customization options

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 details, see Customize an inheritance process.

Once you open the Settings dialog for the Kanban board, choose one of the following tabs to set your customization options.

Settings tab	Customization action
Fields	Add or remove fields from cards.
Includes adding the Parent field to 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 details, 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 details, 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. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{yourorganization}).

2. Open your Kanban board.

3. Choose the backlog level that you want to customize.

   

4. Choose the gear icon to configure the board and set general team settings.

   

Choose which fields appear on cards

You can directly edit a field displayed on a card without having to open it, except for read-only fields like the Change By and Changed Date fields. This quick update feature is useful when you need to update many work items at once. For example, you can add estimates for backlog items on the Kanban board.

You can determine which fields appear on each card type. To add a custom field, you must first add it to the process used to customize the project.

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 appear similar to the following image.

   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.

   

2. Add check mark in the check box for those fields you want to have appear on the board.

   If you want work estimates to show, check Show Effort. Show Effort corresponds to these 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 and close.

Note

To show the Title of the parent work item, choose the Parent field. Choosing the Parent title from a card opens the parent work item. To change the parent work item, open the child work item and remove the link and add a different parent work item. You can filter your board based on parent work items, whether the Parent field is added to cards or not.

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.

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 board settings page, choose Styles to specify a style rule.

2. 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 the following example, we show the Styles page for the Dashboard.

   

   Follow these rules when you create and order 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.

     In the following example, we add a Stale tasks rule that highlights tasks that haven't changed in the last five days.

   

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

4. When you're done, select Save and close.

Assign a color to a tag

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

1. From the Settings dialog, choose Tag colors and then choose the plus icon to add a tag color. Then, select the tag and the color you want to appear on the cards.

   

   Tip

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

2. When you're done, choose Save and close.

Enable or disable an annotation

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.

As shown in the following examples, the Task and Test annotations indicate that two each of tasks and tests have been defined for the work item. Disable the annotations your team doesn't use from the Annotations tab.

Task annotations	Test annotations	No annotations

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

1. From your board settings page, choose Annotations .

2. Check those annotations that you want enabled. For example, to enable tasks but disable tests, check the following boxes.

   

   Note

   GitHub annotations requires Azure DevOps Server 2019 Update 1 or later version. To learn more about linking Azure Boards work items to GitHub artifacts, see Link GitHub commits, pull requests, and issues to work items.

3. When you're done, choose Save and close.

Configure inline tests

You can control the test plan where you create inline tests through the Kanban board. You can 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. From the board settings page (product backlog only), choose Annotations. Make sure that Test annotation is enabled, a requirement to configure inline tests.

2. Then, 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 resulting query.

   

   In a test plan, a test case can exist in multiple test suites. For example, you may define several test suites for each product feature and the test cases test scenarios across features. The test case might exist in both feature's test suite with the same configurations and test steps. Because of this setup, the tester might run the same test case multiple times for the same product version.

   To avoid the redundancies that can occur under this scenario, you should choose Show same outcome of the tests in multiple suites under the same plan checkbox. When checked, the Test Points of the same Test Case and configuration, shows the same latest outcome. When the tester runs any one test, the output is synced with all other test points (which are of the same Test Case work item and same configuration) in the Test Plans. The tester can use the outcome and choose not to run the test again.

3. Select Save and close.

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.

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.

In addition to the dynamic card reordering, you can also move a card to a specific column position.

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.

Move a card to a specific column position

You can reorder the work items within a Kanban board column by choosing …Work items action menu, selecting Move to position, and then specifying a value in the dialog.

Note

The Move to column position feature requires you to enable the New Boards Hub preview feature. To enable this feature, see Manage or enable features.

Specify a value within the range listed, which corresponds to the number of items currently in the column.

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 the gear icon to configure the board and set general team settings.

   

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

   

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

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

Related articles

• Manage and configure team tools
• Setup your backlogs and boards
• Configure status badges
• Show bugs on backlogs and boards
• Select backlog navigation levels for your team
• Set working days
• Set up swimlanes