Aging Chart for Azure DevOps
Track your current work in progress. Monitor your WIP consistency. Assess your average age of WIP trends.
Track your current work in progress. Monitor your WIP consistency. Assess your average age of WIP trends.
Using the Aging Chart for Azure DevOps, you can oversee your current work items in progress. It uses the same visual format as your Azure board, with each column representing a state in your workflow. The Aging Chart for Azure DevOps displays the number of days that a work item has already spent in progress.
The Aging Chart for Azure DevOps helps you identify which states are slowing your delivery speed while your work is still in progress. A big cluster of dots notifies you that too much work in progress is being held up in a certain state.
On the Aging Chart, you will be able to see how many work items in progress are currently available in each column on your Azure board.
Make sure the number of work items doesn’t surpass the WIP limit for each process state. Respecting your WIP limits is an essential part of improving your delivery times and boosting your productivity.
Click on a dot to learn more about your work items in progress. You can see the type of the task a direct link to it on your Azure board. You can also perform an analysis of the amount of time the task has spent in each process state.
Tasks on the same column that have the same WIP age can be found grouped together. To analyze each one individually, click on the dot to expand the list and explore all the details.
The Aging Chart for Azure DevOps provides the flexibility to change your basis date, in order to see what your process looked like on a certain past date. Pick a date, and go back to see how your work items were advancing through your workflow back then.
Using that feature during your retrospectives is a great approach to analyze what your workflow looked like in the past and identify opportunities for improvement.
The percentile lines on your Aging Chart are indicative of your past performance by showing the cycle times that were needed to complete your work previously.
The main thing to remember is that as long as your tasks don’t cross the percentiles you use to define your service level agreements, you are delivering on time. For example, say you’ve committed to the 85th percentile, and the work item has gone into the orange zone, crossing the 70th percentile. Don’t cut from the scope and don’t rush the implementation to be able to deliver it on time. Instead of letting the quality of your work take a hit, to ensure you fulfill your commitment by expedite your work.
The colored health zones provide a timeline of how your past work items advanced in each of your process states. For example, the green zone shows the times that 50% of your previous work items stayed in each state.
By observing the progress of your current work through the zones, you are increasing the chance that you will stand by your commitments. The higher the dots are, the more likely that they’ll encounter a delay. We recommend taking a closer look at the work items that you see moving to the yellow zone, as these work items have already spent more time in your process than half of your previously completed work items.
The WIP widget displays the number of tasks in progress on a selected date, alongside the ability to assess how your WIP trends have changed over time. By hovering over the line chart, you can analyze the number of tasks that were in progress during each date of the selected period.
Maintaining a stable system depends on your work in progress and your average age of work in progress. For these two metrics, consistency is vital – stable systems are determined by keeping both your WIP and the average age of your WIP consistent. The benefit that comes with a more stable delivery workflow, is better predictability and consistency.
The ‘Average Age of WIP’ widget calculates the average age of all your work items in progress for a certain date. It also displays how your WIP age trends have developed over time. If the average age of your WIP stays roughly equal, its trend line will be linear; neither increasing nor decreasing over time, indicating that you are maintaining a stable system.
The average age of WIP and cycle time are very similar metrics - they differ in that, while cycle time is measured against completed tasks, the age of a task considers tasks that are still in progress.