Understanding of Burndown Charts

Function: Burndown diagram A visual representation of the work that needs to be done before the project is completed. It provides project team members and business owners with a public view of the progress of their work. Often used in agile development, agile development is based on the needs of the user evolution as the core, the use of iterative, gradual approach to software development, a project into a goal-specific sub-project.

Features: Burndown charts have a y-axis and an x-axis and basic two lines. The y-axis represents the work to be done, the x-axis represents the time, one line represents the speed, and the other line represents the actual work done. Typically, multiple burndown charts are put together for iterative comparisons.

Example: Apply to agile development, monitor and trend analysis of iterative progress in agile development projects, and each Burndown chart is automatically drawn from Excel according to the daily update data of the sprint backlog. The horizontal axis represents the duration, the ordinate represents the work task commitment work in the sprint, the plan curve represents the progress curve that assumes the member work productivity is constant, the actual curve represents the actual progress curve.

Advantage: Burndown Chart is a information that represents the speed of development, so it can also be called velocity graph or speed curve. It is easy for project team and business owners to visualize the management and performance management, in a clear response to the degree of completion of a project.

Cons: Burndown charts indicate the speed of development, but in practice the Burndown chart does not necessarily indicate the amount of work left, because the workload in agile development is evaluated in story, and the number of one iteration story affects the y-axis. If the number of stories is too small, the resulting Burndown chart will have a pronounced polyline shape and will have an impact on the speed and risk judgments.

The members of the project team also affect the depiction of the Burndown chart. When they find out that this picture is used for performance appraisal, they cheat to conceal the real result.

There are some projects in the early stage and there is no really clear sub-blocks and targets, so it does not apply to agile development and Burndown chart. For example, many projects are just beginning to move in a given direction, but doing this will be blocked or difficult, but moving from its branch into another successful project.

Understanding of Burndown Charts