Sprint rollover report

There is no built-in capabilities in Jira to track work items that has been rolled over from previous Scrum sprint. This articles describes how to track sprint rollover metric with “velocity chart” functionality in Broken Build’s apps.

Start tracking sprint rollover metric by creating velocity charts as Jira Dashboard gadgets (or as pre-configured reports in your Jira projects) with these apps:

• Velocity Charts
• Agile Reports

What is sprint rollover in Scrum

The sprint rollover metric in Scrum refers to the work items that are not completed within previous sprints and are carried over into the next sprint:

“Sprint rollover” metric is often described using various terms such as "carryover," "spillover," or "leftover," all of which indicate the same concept of unfinished work that needs to be addressed in subsequent sprints.

Why sprint rollover metric is important

Sprint rollover metric is such an important indicator of sprint health that, alongside with say-do ratio metric,  it is often used as a KPI for Scrum teams.

Here is why it is important to track and analyze sprint leftovers:

1. Performance Insight: It provides insights into the team's performance and capacity. A high rollover rate may indicate that the team is overcommitting or facing obstacles that prevent them from completing their planned work.
2. Improvement Opportunities: By analyzing the reasons behind the rollover, teams can identify areas for improvement in their processes, estimation techniques, or resource allocation.
3. Planning Accuracy: Understanding rollover trends helps teams make more accurate sprint planning decisions. If certain types of tasks consistently roll over, teams can adjust their future sprint commitments accordingly.
4. Stakeholder Communication: It serves as a communication tool with stakeholders, illustrating the challenges the team faces and the need for adjustments in expectations or support.
5. Focus on Value Delivery: Tracking this metric encourages teams to focus on delivering value within the sprint, as they become more aware of the implications of not completing work on time.

Overall, the sprint rollover metric is a valuable tool for Scrum teams to enhance their effectiveness, improve their processes, and ensure better alignment with project goals.

Track sprint carryover KPI on Jira Dashboard

Analyze the velocity chart

The KPI can be easily visualized on Jira Dashboard with velocity chart gadget:

Let’s analyze sprint 5 of team “Alpha” that uses Story Points (SPs) for estimation:

• Point #1 - we see that 21.5 SPs has moved from one or several previous sprints into sprint 5. Later, we’d elaborate on checking more details about rollovers.
• #2 - 7.1 SPs is the average value for rollover metric over seven sprints analyzed on the chart.
• #3 - 46% of the work planned during sprint planning meeting (see the “Initial commitment” metric) for sprint 5 is the rolled over work from previous sprints.
• #4 - Comparing with sprint 4 (where only 1 SP was carried over) we see a bad trend for sprint 5.

Do deep analysis of rolled over work

Apply filter by rollover metric (#1 on the chart) to better focus on it:

Open work breakdown to find out more details for deeper analysis of leftover work in sprint 5 - in this example, we see that stories were biggest contributors in terms of all lefted over work items.

You can easily change what you see in breakdowns. Change to see breakdowns by Jira projects, releases, epics, labels, etc.:

Get more details about carried over work items

With filters by rollover and stories applied (#1 on the image), we can check what exact stories were carried over from previous sprints:

We see that five stories rolled over from previous sprints (#2) and that even in sprint 5 only three of them were completed (stories #32, #33 become potential roll over for the next sprints after sprint 5).

We also see (#3) that all these stories were part of one sprint prior to be taken into sprint 5.

Apps used in this example

Use our examples to build your own use cases on the Jira Dashboard with these apps:

• Velocity Charts
• Agile Reports

Both apps used in these examples have 30-day free trial and are completely free for teams under 10 people.