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.^[52] 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 this, you could run Cucumber with the following option:

This has some interesting side effects. First, if Cucumber finds more than three scenarios tagged with @wip, it will fail immediately without even running any scenarios. This is an indication that too much is being worked on and that some scenarios should be removed until the other ones are passing (and the @wip tag is removed).

The other side effect is that if any scenarios pass (and remember, you are running only the @wip ones), Cucumber will also fail. This kind of failure is a reminder to remove the @wip tag.