 Hi, my name is Sandra Bappold and I'm a Program Manager on the Kanban team in Visual Studio Team Services. Today, I'm going to share with you some of the best tips and tricks to get the most out of your Kanban board. We'll start with some board basics to cover the fundamentals and then quickly move our way into customizations to match your team's workflow, styling capabilities for enhanced visual cues and a few new features that will take your board experience to the next level. Let's get started. At its core, the Kanban board is a visual representation for your work as it flows from left to right or from new to complete. However, as you probably noticed, this board is slightly more advanced than the default board team started out with. Let's talk about those differences in full screen. First, the columns that define the status of work items in the flow have been renamed from their defaults to more relevant names. As an example, I'll rename the column new to backlog. Next, you'll notice that we have a custom whip limit for the column implementation. Whip limits are work in progress limits shown as these green and black annotations. Whip limits help teams stay focused on completing work before starting new work. For example, if I try to move a work item into the column implementation, the whip limit turns red and I know that I've overcommitted the team. To the left of the whip limit in each active column, you'll notice an information icon. This icon represents the definition of done or the set of requirements the team needs to meet before handing off work to the next stage. Then, you'll notice that the column implementation looks a little bit different from the others. This is because the column has been split into doing and done. Split columns highlight when a work item is complete in one stage and signals when the work can be pulled into the next stage. Split columns also help surface bottlenecks when work items start piling up in the done column. Finally, our board has swim lanes. Swim lanes are horizontal lanes on the board that are perfect for teams with high priority items, blocked items, or different service level classes. And just like columns, you can rename swim lanes directly from the board. I'll rename this default lane to rescue. To fully understand how we made these customizations to the board, I'll navigate to the settings dialog through the gear icon. This dialog contains everything you need to customize your board. From styles, swim lanes, and how teams track bugs, the settings dialog offers a lot of power in one place. First, let's check columns and swim lanes. As you saw, we already renamed our columns directly from the board. But here, you can create a new column, name it, and reorder it amongst the other columns. You'll notice that within each column, there are several settings. The whip limit can be changed to match the team's capacity. Columns can be split into doing and done. And column to state mappings are set for bugs and user stories. I want to highlight here that I've chosen to track bugs as requirements on the con button board through the working with bugs tab. This is a team-specific setting that you can configure to whatever fits your team's preference and workflow. Just like columns, you can create, reorder, and rename swim lanes to your liking. With columns and swim lanes set, I want to configure the data I see on my cards next, and I can do that in the fields tab. Again, since I'm working with bugs on my board, I have settings for both user story cards and bug cards. Of the core fields on a user story, I want to show ID, show assigned to as avatar in full name, and show tags. My team doesn't use story points, so I'll uncheck that option. Then, I'll add one additional field, risk, because it's important for me to understand the risk involved with certain mission activities. Finally, the default is to leave show empty fields unchecked to maximize space on the board, and I will leave it as is, but the option is always there for teams that choose to turn it on. For bugs, I'll set the same core fields. Then, I'll add one additional field for priority to separate mission-critical bugs from the lower priority bugs. With that, let's save and close to view our card customizations on the board. Tags are always on by default, but you can see the potential for very rich cards just with work item IDs and visible values for cards with set priority and risk. Now that we've got our board organized, let's talk about styling. The brain processes visual cues 60,000 times faster than text. For agile teams focused on delivering quality quickly, styles on information-rich cards can make the difference between an unnoticed or stale bug and having a fix ready to go for your customers. I'll show you a few styling rules, but you can get as creative as you want to make this unique for your team. Back in settings, I'll navigate to styles. Here, I have a rule for high-risk user stories. This rule turns the card green if it meets the criteria below. In this case, the risk field is high. Then, we have another rule for high-priority bugs. This rule turns the card red when the priority field is 1. I'll enable both rules now so they apply to the board. Let's create a third styling rule for stale items, meaning the items haven't been updated in some time. First, I'll choose a color, purple, and I'll bold the title style for more emphasis. We can identify stale items that are in the active state by first adding a change date. Then, we can also set the state to active. These rules alone add great visual cues to the board, but that's not all. We can also add colors to tags. For my tag critical, I'll choose the color red so it really pops. And for my tag simulation, I'll choose the color gray. Okay, so let's save and close to see how our board looks now. The result is a more engaging board. I can easily tell at a glance which items are high-priority, high-risk, or stale on my board. And with colorful tags, I have a simple way to group my items into meaningful subsets. Taking the idea of grouping one step further is the inline tasks feature, which allows you to drill down on user stories and break them into more manageable chunks. Through the context menu on a user story, I can choose the option to add a task. I already have a list here, so it'll add a task to the bottom. I also have the option to add a task from the button. You'll notice that the annotation changes as you add more tasks. And when you mark a task as complete, the annotation updates to reflect the progress. You can reorder these tasks on the go, and even re-parent them if you feel it belongs on another user story card. As you use inline tasks more and more, feel free to either keep these lists expanded for comparison and quick access, or close on the board. With all of this Kanban goodness, we needed a way to bring the data to other areas of the product. So we created three new board fields. Board column for your work items current column on the board. Board column done with true or false values to indicate done or doing. And finally, board lane, the work items current swim lane on the board. With this data surfaces fields, you now have the power to query on Kanban. In the query editor, we'll add board column as a filter with the value implementation. And to get more specific, let's add board lane with the value rescue. Run that query and we get all the work items that are an implementation for the rescue operation. Although it's one of the most compelling scenarios, Kanban fields are not limited to just queries. You can leverage them in charts, alerts, and styling rules as well. The benefit is clear. In just a few minutes you have an updated board that's engaging and more importantly helpful to your everyday work. And with Kanban fields, board data is at your fingertips, taking team, productivity, and insights to the next level. Thank you for watching and for more information, please visit aka.ms slash vsds Kanban.