Chapter 6. Understanding the Burndown Chart

Two of the important aspects of Agility are visibility and simplicity. Every Agile team believes in visibility of work progress, communication, and collaboration. In earlier times, we used to have quite complex metrics around to track team progress. In Agile, to track team progress in a particular Sprint, we use quite a simple chart called Burndown chart to represent how much work is remaining and how much has been done over the time of Sprint.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following things:

• The Burndown chart

• Typical Burndown charts

• Viewing Burndown charts in GreenHopper

• Burndown chart measurement units

• Configuring working and non-working days

• Scope management for a Sprint