Shape the board

Fifteen settings that turn a list of cards into a board your process can be read from.

A board works the moment it is bound to a query: columns come from the state model, cards come from the query. Everything on this page is what you add afterwards, when the board has to answer a question at a glance: who is over capacity, what "In Review" is supposed to mean, which requests carry a regulatory deadline, what nobody has touched in a week.

Thirteen of them live in the board's settings panel and apply to everyone who opens that board. The last two have no setting at all. Collapsing and silencing a notice you have answered are both done on the board itself, and both are yours alone. Open a board from Boards → AnyKanban and select Settings to reach the panel. The ad-hoc Board tab on a query's results has no settings panel: it runs on defaults, so shaping a board means creating a named one first.

The pages

• Cap work in progress in a column: put the agreed number on the column header and let it turn red when you are over it.
• Write down what a column actually means: a per-column definition of done, in markdown, behind an info icon.
• Put two columns over one state: name the columns yourself and let several of them share a state, the way the native board does.
• Separate "being worked" from "ready to move on": split a column into Doing and Done, bound to a real field you can query.
• Give expedited work its own lane: named swimlanes with conditions, first match wins.
• Get one row per work item type: swimlanes the simple way, one field, one row per value.
• Compare demand with capacity, per lane: sum a cost or an effort in every lane header and every cell, against a capacity you set per lane.
• Get one lane per period from the iteration tree: one lane per child of an iteration or area node, read again at every load, with an extra lane for what is still unplanned.
• Make regulatory work impossible to miss: card color rules driven by fields and tags.
• Color cards by any date field: deadlines and SLAs, using the @Today macro in a rule. (For "how long has this been sitting?" see the age counter below, which needs no rule.)
• Read a card's age at a glance: the time-in-state counter every card carries by default (in days on most boards), the Aging colors command that highlights the cards that have sat unusually long in each column, on your screen only, and what those numbers do and do not mean.
• Color the tags you actually use: a color per tag name, so the pills carry meaning.
• Choose what each card shows: card fields and their order, the ID toggle, and hiding empty fields.
• Collapse the parts of the board you are not using: columns and swimlane rows, remembered per user.
• Silence a notice you have already answered: hide a warning about something that is never going to change, on that board, for you, and bring it back from the board's menu.