Using TFS Kanban Boards: Creation, Configuration, and Customization

Kanban is widely used in modern application development, whether following waterfall or agile methodologies, because of its simple management method and intuitive display; many software teams adopt it for development management. This article briefly introduces how to use the Kanban features of TFS.

Creating a TFS Kanban Board

TFS provides three default team project templates—Scrum, Agile, and CMMI. After creating a project, click Work → Boards on the Product Backlog page to access the Kanban board (formerly called "Kanban" before TFS 2013).

The default board shows four columns because TFS stores work items (requirements, tasks, bugs, etc.) with a "State" field. In the default Scrum template, product backlog items have four states: New, Approved, Committed, and Done, which become the column names. Changing column names or adding new columns requires modifying the work item template via command line or TFS Power Tools.

TFS Kanban Features

If you have a large touch screen, you can open the board in full‑screen mode to replace a physical whiteboard with an electronic one.

Column names can be edited directly by clicking them.

The default board creates four columns based on the backlog item states; you can add custom columns such as "Selected" to show work for the current iteration.

WIP (Work In Process) limit : the maximum number of backlog items allowed in a column, which varies per column and reflects team capacity.

Status mapping : defines how the work item state changes when a card is moved to a column.

In‑progress and Done indicators : allow fine‑grained tracking of items that are being worked on versus completed within a column.

Definition of Done : can be displayed by writing a Markdown script in the column description.

Next, add some PBI and Bug items as sample data.

By default, cards only show fields that have values; you can configure which fields appear and make all fields visible regardless of value, and all displayed fields are editable.

Core fields : default fields on a card; visibility can be toggled with a checkbox.

Additional fields : up to ten extra fields can be added to a card, including custom fields.

Show empty fields : a checkbox controls whether empty fields are displayed.

If your system includes both front‑end and back‑end components, you can use the swimlane feature to group cards by type.

The board’s advantage is giving the team a clear view of overall status. Default settings provide weak visibility of individual members' work; you can enhance visual cues by customizing card background colors, fonts, and conditional styling.

In the screenshots, black cards have no estimated effort, white cards are unassigned, and each member’s claimed PBIs are colored differently, allowing a quick visual assessment of the iteration’s development status.

Card background colors and work item tag colors can also be customized.

This article introduced TFS Kanban features; the next article will detail how to use a TFS Kanban board to complete a Scrum iteration.