Home / Announcements / Forums / TFS Work Item Manager and Project Dashboard: TFS Work Item Manager > Customize task board

• Chuck Kroemer

  Posted on Feb 15, 2010 (permalink)

  Hi,
  
  We have been using the work item manager for a couple months now.  We really use it mainly for the task board as that gives us a nice view of our WIP and the ability to move items across the task board easily.
  
  Some nice enhancements to the task board that I hope you are considering soon are:
  
  1. Ability to customize the colors based on the work item type (including custom types) and the ability to designate a color based on the value of a specific field in the work item.  This would allow us to better color-code our task board cards based on categorizations of the work items themselves.  (I saw another thread with a similar request to this.)
  
  2. Ability to customize what fields are shown on the task board cards.  We have customized work item types and it would be helpful to be able to display the values of some of our custom fields on the cards.
  
  3. Ability to have more than one task board.  We have user stories that run across the board.  However, user stories have underlying task work items the detail all the tasks to be completed in order to implement the user story.  So our user stories have a task board, but when the user story is in "development" on its board, we actually have a "sub-taskboard" for the tasks to be completed for that user story.
  
  Thanks,
  chuck

  Reply

• Joel Joel

  Posted on Feb 16, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello Chuck,
  
  Thanks for the feedback and feature suggestions.  Here is my response to them.
  
  1. This is a good idea and as you mentioned, it has been requested before.  We will strongly consider adding it to a future release.
  
  2. I have added this request to our backlog.
  
  3. This feature exists already, though perhaps it wasn't implemented quite how you need it to be.  If you mouse over a sticky note a small link icon appears that when clicked will display a new task board for the related work items.
  
  Thanks,
  Joel
  

  
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• Johan Asplund

  Posted on Feb 24, 2010 (permalink)

  Hi

  I have two similar requests :)

  
  

  1.In the Taskboard, is it possible to divide it using other fields than State? We have created our own field to reflect where the developer are in the process.
  

  2. It would be grate to be able to show linked Work Items directly on the Taskboard where it is applicable, i.e. if you group it on Area Path, or maybe that could be its own view where the you show all the Workitems of one type on the top level and the linked Workitems are shown beneath and the progress can be shown as a gauge on each Workitem.

  Attached files

  • wi.png

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• Joel Joel

  Posted on Feb 25, 2010 (permalink)

  Hi Johan,
  
  I believe I just responded to this question in the general feedback section, but I will re-post my response here for the benefit of others.
  
  At the moment there is no way to use a field other than State for columns in the task board.
  
  As for your second question, we have tried a number of different things to show related work items in the task board, but this is not an easy thing to do efficiently using the TFS 2008 API.  What we settled on was having a link icon on each sticky note that when clicked on would display all the related work items in a separate task board.  I'm not sure if you have seen this feature yet.  Does this suit your needs?  Displaying the related work items beneath a sticky note like in your screenshot is an interesting idea though and it has given us one more option to consider.
  
  Regards,
  Joel
  the Telerik team

  
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• Daryl

  Posted on Apr 8, 2010 (permalink)

  I think the Taskboard looks great, and I appreciate how speedy it is. However I would really like it to display the way all our physical taskboards do -- a row for each story, with the Product Backlog Item in the leftmost column, and tasks in the same row by state, in the way that Conchango does it (screenshot). Is that feature coming?
  
  Thanks,
  --d
  
  Update: Just found this thread on parent work items. I really hope that view comes back into the product. 

  Reply

• Joel Joel

  Posted on Apr 9, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello Daryl,
  
  Adding a task board view in the way that you describe is very high on our list of features to add.  TFS 2010 makes it much easier and much more efficient to retrieve the work items required for this view.  So it is highly likely that we will at least add it to the 2010 version that was recently released.   
  
  Regards,
  Joel
  the Telerik team

  
  Do you want to have your say when we set our development plans? Do you want to know when a feature you care about is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Tracking system and vote to affect the priority of the items.

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• Oliver

  Posted on Aug 13, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello everybody,
  
  I'm really happy about the WIM!! Also I would be very interested in the features Chuck describes (especially the first two). Is there a way to find out what you planned for the next version and roughly when you plan to release it?
  
  Thanks a lot and keep up the great work
  Oliver

  Reply

• Ryan Ryan

  Posted on Aug 13, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello Oliver,

  I am sorry, but we have not slated our next release date for WIM. The features that you mention have not yet been added internally, but they are being considered as additions to make before our next release.

  All the best,
  Ryan
  the Telerik team

  Do you want to have your say when we set our development plans? Do you want to know when a feature you care about is added or when a bug fixed? Explore the Telerik Public Issue Tracking system and vote to affect the priority of the items

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• Bas Hammendorp

  Posted on Sep 20, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello Joel,
  
  As Daryl allready mentioned, this feature will also be really appriciated by us. We also want to make the switch to Telerik taskboard, but I think the tasks by user story is essential in this.
  
  So thanks in advanced building this feature in and I can't wait for the new release.
  
  Regards,
  Bas Hammendorp

  Reply

• Daryl

  Posted on Sep 20, 2010 (permalink)

  We're now trying out the Scrum Master's Workbench from EMC Consulting -- who used to be the Conchango people. It's free, and it's pretty.
  
  --Daryl

  Reply

• nbahl

  Posted on Dec 13, 2011 (permalink)

  I was wondering if there has been any changes to allow users to customize the color of the task board cards?
  Thanks
  

  Reply

• Ian

  Posted on Dec 14, 2011 (permalink)

  I too would like to add to the comments above about "Ability to have more than one task board"
  
  The tak link feature is perfect for what I want to achieve except for one thing.
  
  I have three levels of work items with parent child releationships. 
      Projects
      MMF's
      Tasks
  
  Each has it's own process within tfs with its own states.
      Project (Backlog, Initiation, In Prgress, Done)
      MMF (Backlog, To Do, Test Preparation, Dev, Test, Release, Done)
      Task (To Do, In Progress, Review, Done)
  
  The taskboard only has one set of columns that need to encompas all of the states available for all work items that can be displayed. What would prevent a change to allow these to be configured for each work item type?
  
  

  Reply

• Joel Joel

  Posted on Dec 14, 2011 (permalink)

  Nate, the feature for customizing the colors of the cards is still in our backlog and I have added another vote for it.
  
  Ian, I agree that being able to configure multiple different boards would be a very useful feature and it is interesting to hear how it would work in your case.  I have added this feedback to our backlog.
  
  Thanks for the feedback guys.
  Joel
  the Telerik team

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