I'm looking for recommendations on a process for deferring items from an iteration, specifically Tasks, Defects and Enhancements. At the moment we're using the Default Workflow with no changes.

One proposal I have is to resolve the item with a resolution of Later. This is fairly intuitive, provides an easy way to query, allows the deferred item to remain listed in the iteration plan while no longer counting toward remaining effort needed. Once the iteration ends, any deferred items are retriaged. The downside is that the item is marked as Resolved.

Another idea is to mark the item in some other way (a tag or custom field maybe) but leave it In Progress. Again it stays listed in the current iteration but is flagged as deferred. The downside there is that the remaining work for the item will be counted against the plan.

A third idea is to re-triage the item to a future iteration, while the current iteration is still in progress. The downside here is that the item disappears from the current iteration plan with no easy way of indicating in the plan that it was deferred.

Any other recommendations for handling this?

How does the Deferred Work Item report gather its data? Does it just use the data warehouse to compare items that were in a plan one day to items in the plan the next day?

Thanks,
Jay