I never thought about the danger of tracking “remaining hours” and you are right, we could get to the end of the iteration with just 5h remaining, but still we wouldn’t have delivered any business value.

Perhaps this hasn’t happened to my teams yet because we inherently try to focus on delivering the stories and not just tasks.

thanks for responding.

I didn’t mean to say that your point is not valid, sorry if it didn’t come across that way. Your second chart is telling the truth perfectly well. My argument is more towards what I read from it vs. what I don’t read from the first. In other words, personally I find the future (points / hours left) more relevant than the past (points / hours already ‘done’).

Hope that clarifies a bit. Anyways, great post and yes, I will read that other article of yours .

Have a happy new year!
Dominique

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http://www.st-webdevelopment.com

Tracking the time that the team already spent on a project doesn’t say anything about the grade of completion, the article got that right. The second chart uses story points instead of hours as unit for the vertical axis. The effect is as the article describes, the burndown chart now shows the amount of completed work instead of amount of time spent.

However I’d argue that the major benefit of the second chart is that it also shows the amount of work that is left which the first chart does not.

While the difference seems to be minor at first glance in my experience it is a critical shift in the way people have to think. I as a ScrumMaster do not care the least bit about how much time the team spends on User Story #4711. That information might be interesting for billing the client and for the sprint retrospective. All I care for in terms of “how well are we doing” is how much work is left vs. how much time is left.

The past is irrelevant. Just to be clear, the second chart in this article shows that, only the article text is not very clear about this difference.

my 2 cents,
Dominique

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http://www.st-webdevelopment.com

I also tend not to use sprint burndown charts at all. Depending on the team’s preference, I use either a kanban-style board for the stories, or just the simple “4-dot” status on the story cards – Development Started, Development Complete, QA Complete, Accepted by Business (i.e. Done, Done).

Again, the tasks are secondary and just used to identify what needs to be done to deliver the stories.

Dave Rooney
The Agile Consortium

This post was mentioned on Twitter by AgileForAll: I just created a new #agile blog post: : Agile antipattern: Burndown charts that hide the truth http://bit.ly/8mSLwU...