Managing Your Work in Progress (WIP)

Having a lot of pending or half-implemented features and scenarios is something you should try to avoid. It makes it hard to stay focused, and it also has a negative effect on the lead time—the time from starting to releasing—of each feature.[54] A common term for started but unfinished work is work in progress, often called just WIP. If the team keeps a low number of WIP, the lead time of each feature will also be lower.

Cucumber can help you manage your WIP with the help of tags and the --wip option. Try to make it a habit to tag each scenario that is being worked on with @wip and remove the tag when it passes. Let’s say your team has agreed to always keep the WIP at or below three scenarios. To enforce ...

Get The Cucumber Book now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.