Manage columns on your board

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

Managing columns on your board is essential for visualizing your team's workflow. Each column corresponds to a stage of work, such as "To do," "In progress," and "Done." You can customize these columns to match your specific process, while each card on the board represents a work item, such as a user story, bug, or task.

Prerequisites

To avoid revisiting your configuration, do the following tasks per role.

You should also review the following articles:

• Kanban board overview
• Configure and customize Azure Boards
• Set up your backlogs and boards
• Workflow states and state categories

Map workflow states

Your 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

The following table lists example workflows and their descriptions, so you can identify your team's workflows.

2. Familiarize yourself with work item types and boards

Familiarize yourself with the different work item types and their corresponding boards. Understanding where each type appears helps you manage your work effectively.

3. Specify the workflow State

Specify the workflow State for each work item type (WIT) and column, using one of the following four categories:

Add and edit columns

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

Do the following steps to add and edit your columns:

1. Open your board.

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

   

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.

   

4. Select from the following actions, as appropriate:

   • Rename your column titles to map to your workflow stages. You can add, rename, and move columns to support more stages. In the following examples, we rename the first three columns to Backlog, Analyze, and Develop and add a column labeled Test.

     Rename a column directly from the board.

     

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

     

   • Change the column order by dragging the column tab to the position that you want.

   • Delete a column by first making sure that the column doesn't contain any work items and if it does, move the items to another column. Then, do the following steps:

     1. Open Settings and select Columns > Column options menu .
     2. Select Remove from the menu.

     

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

   Update state mappings when you add columns, workflow states, or WITs, which is typically necessary when you change the Working with bugs setting, add WITs to the Requirement category, or customize the workflow.

6. Select Save.

Update status and handoff items

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

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.

Track 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

Split columns

Each column represents a work stage, showing the number of items in progress. However, there’s often a lag between moving work into a column and starting it. To address this lag, enable split columns, which divide each column into "Doing" and "Done."

Split columns help your team implement a pull mechanism, providing visibility into idle items and improving workflow transparency.

Move items into the Doing and Done columns

With split columns enabled, update item statuses as usual. However, now when you complete work on an item, you move it into Done, instead of a downstream column. When you complete an item, move it to Done instead of a downstream column. The next team member pulls it into Doing and reassigns it to themselves when ready.

For example, after finishing a coding task, move it to Done under Develop. The tester then pulls it into Doing under Test when ready to start testing.

Identify bottlenecks

Split columns provide you even greater insight into how many items sit idle in a Done column. Your team can readily see when items pile up, which signal a potential bottleneck.

By reviewing the frequency of pile ups and where they occur, your team can adjust their processes to eliminate the bottlenecks. Workflow processes that incur no or few bottlenecks correspond to perfect flows. No item sits in a queue for any

Choose which columns you want to split

Before you split columns, ensure you mapped each stage of your team's process to a column. Only split columns where clear hand-offs exist and you want teams to pull the item into the next stage.

List work items in a Doing or Done column

You can query for work items in a split column using the Board Column Done field. This field takes of a value of False when in the Doing column and True when in the Done column.

For examples on querying Board columns, see Query by assignment or workflow changes.

Add the Definition of Done to a column

When your team advances from one stage to the next in their work, it's crucial that they have a shared understanding of what constitutes as "Done." You can define the criteria for the Definition of Done in each column. By doing so, the team can identify the necessary tasks that need to be completed before advancing an item to the next stage. This task also implements one of the core tenets, make processes and policies explicit.

Team members can quickly double-check the criteria by choosing the Information tooltip info icon.

1. Open your board.

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

   

3. Choose Columns and then a column tab to configure the Definition of Done for that column.

   

4. Select Save.

Do more tasks

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

Related articles

• Accelerate work with swimlanes
• Show bugs on backlogs and boards
• Azure Boards FAQs
• REST API Boards reference