How carryover is counted
Carryover is the work a team did not finish in a sprint and carried on with. Agile Analytics counts it with one rule in every view, so the same sprint shows the same number wherever you look. This is the sentence you see above every carryover number:
Carryover: items that were in the sprint for at least a day and were not done when it ended, including ones moved straight to the next sprint. Items moved back to the backlog count as removed scope.
The rule
An item is carryover for a finished sprint when all three are true.
- 1. It was really in the sprint
The item sat in the sprint at the end of at least one sprint day. An item pulled in by mistake and taken out again the same day never counts.
- 2. It was not done
It had not reached a state your Workflow Mapping calls Done by the time the sprint ended (or by the time it left the sprint). Work finished up to one day after the last sprint day still counts as done, so a late close in another time zone is not held against the team.
- 3. It stayed or rolled forward
It was still in the sprint when the sprint ended, or it was moved straight into the next sprint. Moving it anywhere else, such as back to the backlog, makes it removed scope instead.
Examples
| What happened | Carryover? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Still In Progress when the sprint ends. | Yes | It was in the sprint and not done. |
| Moved to the next sprint halfway through, unfinished, to make room. | Yes | Moving work forward early is still carrying it over. |
| Pulled in by mistake and moved out an hour later. | No | It was never in the sprint at the end of a day. |
| Moved back to the backlog, unfinished. | No | That is removed scope: the team decided not to do it, rather than carrying it. |
| Added one day before the end and not finished. | Yes | It counts, and the view says how many items were added in the last 2 days so a late pull cannot hide inside the number. |
| Reached Ready to Release on the last day, mapped as Done. | No | Done means the first state your Workflow Mapping calls Done, whatever happens after it. |
How the number is worked out
Carryover items divided by every item that was in the sprint at the end of at least one day. It can never go over 100%, and it does not need a commitment: a sprint planned on the fly still gets a carryover number.
A running sprint shows a dash with "Carryover is counted when the sprint ends." Averages and trends only use sprints that have ended.
Carryover reads each finished sprint’s history from Azure DevOps. The rest of the page appears first and the carryover cells fill in a moment later (you may briefly see “…”). Each sprint is read once per session.
Imported or very old items sometimes have no recorded sprint moves. They are treated as in the sprint on every day, and Sprint Summary says how many there were.
Where you see it
The Carryover tile on each team card, and the Carryover column in the one-line-per-team strip.
The Carryover column for each sub-team.
The Carryover column and average in Sprint Velocity, and the Carryover figure in the current sprint panel.
The Carryover Rate card and the Carryover column in the sprint table.
Carryover in each team’s section, the combined headline and the copied or printed report.
Where it is not used yet
These are the places where a carryover figure can still differ, so you can recognise the difference instead of chasing it.
These still show the earlier measure (committed items not finished by the sprint end) while we move them over. Retro Snapshot compares with your saved retros, so it moves once older snapshots can be compared fairly.
Its per-person carryover is a different measure about each person’s own items, and is not affected.
FAQ
Before 6.68.0 different views measured carryover in different ways. Now every view above uses this one rule, so the same sprint shows the same number everywhere. The base is every item in the sprint rather than only the committed ones, and unfinished work moved straight to the next sprint now counts.
No. One rule for every team is what makes the numbers comparable. What you can change is your Workflow Mapping, which decides which states count as Done.
No. It reads each item’s sprint and state history in your browser and works the number out there. Nothing is written to Azure DevOps.
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