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 defered to the next iteration. Defered work item is a work item that has been assign to an iteration but cannot be completed as plan. Initially, the deferred numbers may vary becuase the team do not know their own capability to complete the work item. Then after couple iterations, it shouldl be close to zero throughout the life cycle. (similar to Iteration Velocity metric)

Meausrement 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 when the trend remain stable or high overtime. This indicates that there are more tasks than the capacity of the team. You may need to re-evaluate the iteration velocity and adjust it accordingly.

There may be the case that there is a high number of work items deferred to some iteration. You need to do further analysis on what went wrong in the last iteration.