Burndown Charts

In a project most of the stake-holders are only interested in the amount of work completed and if things are on track. In a Agile/SCRUM environment the best tool for showing this is the burn down chart. These are extremely simple to create with any Spreadsheet software, I commonly use both Excel and Google Docs for this. I will try and outline a simple way of doing this below:

For the burn-down chart to you need two pieces of information the amount of developer points in the SCRUM and the duration in Working days. After defining the iteration the total points (this is an indicator of the total effort involved) for the Iteration and the launch date of the iteration.

As an example lets imagine that their are 240 developer points or hours remaining and the iteration is over 20 working days, The visual elements of the graph would have duration in days running left to right and points on the vertical axis. In this example the developers would have to complete 12 points a day so a baseline graph can be plotted.

In Excel I create a table showing the baseline points for each day and beside this display the actual number of points left. This cell is generated by the formula number=yesterdays points – points done today. I will attach a example of this sheet at the end of the blog.

This baseline is important if you want to at a glance to see if the project is on schedule or running late, the speed of assessment and the simplicity is what makes the burn-down chart so useful. The other interesting thing is that the burn down chart quickly shows how good the developers are at estimating what they are capable of achieving in a day.

From a project management view point it quickly gives a good estimate to the actual finish date and if there are any issues allows you to spot them sooner rather than later.

The examples are of a project that is running late:

Burndown Chart Example

As you can see the Baseline or the target for the iteration is shown in blue and is an equal and gradual line that reaches the 0 at the end of day 20. The actual iteration is shown by the Green line which shows a difference between the estimated time and completion date. If you follow the Green line you will see that it is going to be about 2 to 3 days late in delivery or that the work has been under estimated by about 2 to 3 days.

It is this speed that makes the burn down chart among one of the most useful PM tools for software development.

Example format for a Burndown chart File Attachment: Burndown example.xlsx (11 KB)

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Related posts:

1. Mary & Tom Poppendieck – Failure Cost