If a work item is in a state that is not mapped to a particular column, the card representing it will be displayed at the bottom of the task board with the following error message:

! The following work item needs your attention.

To configure states for a particular column and work item type, simply add it to the section of the configuration file.  For example, if there is a Task work item, that has a Ready to test state that we want to map to the column InProgress. The XML code under the columns section

<Column ColumnType="InProgress" AssigneeRestriction="Assigned" AutoAssign="true">
    <ColumnStates>
    ...
        <WorkItemTypeState WorkItemType="Task">
            <States>
                <State>In Progress</State>
            </States>
        </WorkItemTypeState>
    ...
    </ColumnStates>
</Column>

becomes:

<Column ColumnType="InProgress" AssigneeRestriction="Assigned" AutoAssign="true">
    <ColumnStates>
    ...
        <WorkItemTypeState WorkItemType="Task">
            <States>
                <State>In Progress</State>
                <State>Ready to test</State>
            </States>
        </WorkItemTypeState>
    ...
    </ColumnStates>
</Column>

To help differentiate between the different states, a colored spot is displayed on each card on the task board. The colors for the different states are configured under the StateConfiguration section which is usually found at the end of the file. The color values themselves are simply CSS colors, in hexadecimal or as named colors. It would look something like this:

<StateConfiguration>
    <WorkItemType Name="Task">
        <States>
            <State Value="To Do" Color="#99CDDF"/>
            <State Value="In Progress" Color="#3E81DD"/>
            <State Value="Test" Color="Purple"/>
            <State Value="Done" Color="Green"/>
            <State Value="Removed" Color="Black"/>
         </States>
    </WorkItemType>
</StateConfiguration>

See also

• Adding an extra column
• Customizing Process Templates