How are PBI's supposed to be moved off the kanban board?

Question

My team is using TFS 2015 Update 3 to manage our work items. They prefer using the kanban board over the list. We have several columns. One of the columns is named Done (it's one of the defaults).

The Kanban board in TFS is not specific to a sprint -- it shows the PBIs for all sprints.

Our team has iterated through about 400 pbi's as of this point in time. All 400 of them are sitting in the Done column. Whats the intended best practice regarding all of these PBIs that are sitting there? Should they stay their indefinately? Or is there an intended practice of purging them from the system?

I suppose I could hide the done column during regular hours, and have the PBI's moved into that column in bulk during each sprint review, but that seems contrived, and is it really using the system the way it's been designed?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Generally you cannot 'move off' the Done PBIs from the kanban board. Of cause you can remove the Done PBIs directly if sure that they are not useful anymore, but we don't recommend to do that.

You can collapse the Done column to purge the Done PBIs from the system, since May 15th 2015 first and last column on Kanban Board can be collapsed:

• The first (New Column) and last (Done column) columns on your board are now collapsible.

Actually you can set the area and iteration paths to purge the Kanban board.

eg: (See below screenshot) When only select Group1 area, then in board you can only see the work items which the Area Path set as Group1. Also you can select Iterations/Sprints to display the work items which belongs to the specific iterations/Sprints.

Another way is add a custom columns for each sprint , then move the Done PBIs to each column correspondingly. But the column state cannot map to Done in this way, it can only maps to Approved Committed New. So, it just can be used for filter the done PBIs for each Sprint in Kanban board.