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Planned vs UnPlanned Carry Over in an Agile Sprint

Last post 08:12 am June 19, 2019 by John McGinty
4 replies
07:14 pm June 17, 2019

My question is related to Carryover as it is measured in a Sprint.  

What is usually measured in a Sprint, Planned Carryover or Unplanned Carryover?  Please define what your understanding is of both types of carryover means to you.

 


10:22 pm June 17, 2019

What do you mean by carryover?

If you are referring to user stories that are not completed within a Sprint, then these should be placed on the Product Backlog for the Product Owner to reprioritise.

In practice, the teams I have worked with, the PO indicates they would like work to continue on them. So we just add them to the next sprint.

I've never heard of Planned Carryover or Unplanned Carryover.


02:43 am June 18, 2019

What is usually measured in a Sprint, Planned Carryover or Unplanned Carryover?

Wouldn’t a Scrum Team be more likely to assess work that has been “Done” and work that remains to be “Done”?


08:12 pm June 18, 2019

John, are you attempting to draw a distinction between incomplete items that were either part of an initial sprint forecast, or pulled into a sprint already in progress?

If so, what would the presence of items in either category tell you?


08:12 am June 19, 2019

If I had to guess on this as I've not heard of carryover

Planned carry over: work that the team knew would take longer than a sprint but brought it in instead of breaking it down (it happens)

Unplanned carrry over: work that was planned to be completed in the sprint but wasn't finished or accepted.

What is measured during and at the end of the sprint is work done (meets the acceptance criteria of the work and the team's definition of done). The important thing is to not fake Done - changing the definitions of done to fit a report. 

I broke the work done into three elements

Work accepted - AC + DoD

1. Team heat - how hot the team are running

2. Code heat - how well the work was produced

3. System heat - how stable the overall system is running

The state of carry over/unfinished work is a indicator on one or many of the factors. Have a look at what is stopping planned work being done rather than lowering the amount of work planned (the Toyota way is the key example of how to increase production through greater flexibility and quality).

 


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