Burndown

A burndown chart is an agile tool to track the total remaining work in the ongoing Sprint or Release. This tool visually suggests the trend and likelihood of achieving the Sprint or Release goal.

This chart is also one of the various information radiators, which are typically used to inform the stakeholders on the status of ongoing Sprint. This is quite contrary to traditional Project reporting, which involves explicit work in gathering Project data, consolidating, and aggregating. And them publishing it to Stakeholders.

Video: Burndown

Sprint Burndown

Sprint burndown can be charted using either of the following aspects

• Story Points
• Task hours

A typical burndown chart represents “Time” on the X-Axis. The span of the X-Axis covers the timeline of the ongoing Sprint only. And the Y-Axis represents the remaining work (Story points or Hours).

This chart is only accurate when the team members update the remaining work of their tasks every day during the Sprint. The closer the line is to the ideal line (orange line in the above graph), the healthier the progress of the Sprint.

Release Burndown

As you might have guessed, a Release Burndown is a tool to assess the progress of an ongoing Release.

A SCRUM master typically updates this chart at the end of every Sprint, throughout the release. This tool is also useful to identify the additional scope that is being delivered in the release on top of what was originally committed.