Guideline: Work Items List

Introduction

The Artifact: Work Items List captures all scheduled work to be done within the project, as well as proposed work that may affect the product. Some of the Work Items may be implemented in this project, some of them may be implemented in a future project, and some of them may never be implemented.

Some of the work items may still be poorly defined, representing a big chunk of work requiring potentially several staff months of effort. As the priority of these work items increase, they are typically decomposed into smaller work items that represent specific and well-defined tasks that may take hours or days to address. In other cases, specific and well-defined work items are created directly, representing for example a defect to be addressed, see Figure 1.

The higher priority, the more well-defined the work item should be. Top priority work items are addressed in next iteration. Work items can be added, removed and reprioritized at any time.

Figure 1. Work Items List provides one prioritized list of scheduled and proposed work.

A Work Item may represent work associated with a defect, enhancement request, use case, scenario, user story, supporting requirement, or anything else that captures a potential requirement or improvement to your system. A Work Item may reference any type of requirement, defect, enhancement request, or other useful information guiding you in what needs to be done.

A big advantage with the Artifact: Work Items List is that it enables you to prioritize only one list containing all the things that may need to be addressed, whether the work item represent a work related to a requirement, enhancement, or defect. The one exception is that we separately prioritize the risk list.

Nothing in the project will get done if not represented or mapped to a Work Item. This means that all requirements, defects and change requests have to at some stage be mapped to a work item. Also, a developer will not take on work that is not represented in a Work Item. Only Work Items needs to be prioritized. This also means that tracking Work Items are a primary means of understanding status of the project.

There are two major types of Work Items:

Un-scheduled Work Items: These Work Items have not yet been assigned to an iteration, and there is no detailed effort estimate for the Work Item yet.
Scheduled Work Items: These Work Items are assigned to an iteration, and typically have an additional set of attributes filled in, such as detailed effort estimates.

Un-scheduled Work Items

Most Work Items are initially un-scheduled, meaning that it has not yet been decided whether to do them, and when to do them. Unscheduled Work Items should always represent something meaningful to deliver to stakeholders, such a scenario to be detailed, designed, implemented and tested. You may consider capturing the following data for such Work Items:

Name
Description
Priority
Size estimate, such as a point estimate, see Guideline: Agile Estimation.
State, such as New, Assigned, Resolved, Verified, Closed, see Work Items States below
Links to other reference material, such as requirements or detailed specifications of what needs to be done

Scheduled Work Items

Once a Work Item has been assigned to an iteration, it becomes scheduled. Note that we only assign Work Items to the current or next iteration. There is no point in assigning Work Items to a specific future iteration, since we cannot predict what a meaningful schedule will be more than an iteration in advance, see Guideline: Iteration Planning.

The following additional attributes are useful for Scheduled Work Items:

Target iteration
Responsible team member
Effort estimate left, such as actual hours of work, see Guideline: Agile Estimation.
Hours worked

This provides the information required to plan and manage an iteration. We can plan iterations by understanding effort involved and we can do Report: Iteration Burndown by tracking how much work is left.

Work Items States

We have found the following states to be useful to track Work Items:

New: Work Item has been created, but not yet assigned to a team member.
Assigned: A team member has been identified as responsible for the Work Item.
Resolved: The team member responsible for the work items has implemented and tested the Work Item.
Verified: The Work Item has been independently tested.
Closed: The Work Item is no longer active.

You may choose another set of states, based on your needs.