The Work in progress graph displays the number of items in progress (maximum, minimum, and average) for the selected period.
You can evaluate how well your team is working together to accomplish the same goal. You can view this data by sprint or week, as you prefer. However, note that if a Kanban-type board has been linked to your Axify project, the "sprint" option will not be available in the filters at the top of the page.
Psst! Be careful not to confuse this graph with the one of the same name available in the Technical Axis since they do not use the same data (different sources for the two Axes).
Reading the graph
For the following graph, the period displayed corresponds to the last three months, and the display mode is by week. On average, the team is working on 5 items at a time. Given the size of this team, this is approximately one item per person. Of course, the maximum and the minimum number of items worked on in parallel can vary.
As this graph is interactive, hovering over it with your mouse will display the details of the work in progress, i.e. the maximum active work as well as the minimum for that week or sprint.
The goal here is to work on the right number of items simultaneously to ensure quality delivery and encourage collaboration while delivering value to the customer. On that note, it may be interesting to correlate this data with throughput or cycle time breakdown (for the same week or sprint) to learn more about the potential impact of a high wip, for example. In a similar fashion, correlating this data to the change failure rate can be revealing, in case you notice an increase in the number of incidents following releases.
Psst! As with many other charts in the Process Axis, the key to success is stability. While variations are inevitable, there should not be significant deviations over time.
This graph also includes a variation indicator, which compares the average number of ongoing items for the current period with the average of the previous period. To learn more about the variation indicator and its calculation, check out this article!
Calculating the metric
Axify compiles, based on development cycles' start and end dates, the total number of active items in your project board. The maximum and minimum measures are then transposed into this chart and used to calculate the average number of active items for a given week or sprint.