Deferred Work Items |
This guideline describes how to measure and use the deferred work items trends.
Main Description
### Overview The deferred work item metric is used for measuring the capability of the team by observing the number of work items that are deferred to the next iteration. A deferred work item is a work item that has been assign to an iteration but cannot be completed as planned. Initially, the deferred numbers may vary because the team does not know their own capability to complete the work item. After a few iterations, it should be close to zero throughout the lifecycle (similar to Iteration Velocity metric) ### Measurement Method Total number of planned work items in iteration Total number of deferred work items in iteration. ### Measurement Analysis A good way to monitor deferred work items over time is to plot a trend chart. The team should pay attention if the trend remains stable or high overtime. This indicates that there are more tasks than the capacity of the team to complete them. You may need to re-evaluate the iteration velocity and adjust it accordingly. There may be a case that there is a high number of work items deferred to a certain iteration. You need to do further analysis on what went wrong in the last iteration.
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