The Daily Scrum and the Burn-down Charts
The Daily Scrum getting better with the Sprint Burn-down charts
What are the Burn-down charts?
A chart which shows the amount of work which is thought to remain in a backlog. Time is shown on the horizontal axis and work remaining on the vertical axis. As time progresses and items are drawn from the backlog and completed, a plotline showing work remaining may be expected to fall. The amount of work may be assessed in any of several ways such as user story points or task hours. Work remaining in Sprint Backlogs and Product Backlogs may be communicated by means of a burn-down chart. Source — Scrum Glossary, Scrum.org
What does Scrum have to say about the Burn-down charts?
Under the ‘Monitoring Progress Toward Goals’ section in the Scrum guide, there is a mention for burn-down charts, “Various projective practices upon trending have been used to forecast progress, like burn-downs, burn-ups, or cumulative flows.”
The usage of burn-down charts is neither mandated nor even recommended part of the Scrum guide.
If so, from where are we getting this notion to use Burn-down charts for the Scrum team?
The following reference from the Scrum guide creates an opportunity for something like a Burn-down to complement the Development Teams’ practices:
“As new work is required, the Development Team adds it to the Sprint Backlog. As work is performed or completed, the estimated remaining work is updated. At any point in time in a Sprint, the total work remaining in the Sprint Backlog can be summed. The Development Team tracks this total work remaining at least for every Daily Scrum to project the likelihood of achieving the Sprint Goal. By tracking the remaining work throughout the Sprint, the Development Team can manage its progress.”
Scrum teams started using Burn-down charts especially, to sum up ‘the total work remaining in the Sprint Backlog’. This information helps the Scrum team to know where it stands in accomplishing the Sprint Goal.
How do we effectively use the Burn-down chart in the Daily Scrum?
The Development Team members driving the Daily Scrum to come prepared post updating the information towards progress made. They can leverage using an Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) tool or the Scrum board physically maintained.
This generates the Sprint Burn-down as a graphical illustration of showing the remaining estimated time to completion for the whole team vs time. It drives conversation among the Development Team members on what might take longer than expected and what attention, also is required to get it done.
Sprint Burn-down charts is one of the tools meant for the Development team to have a look at their progress and plan for the next 24 hours in the Sprint.
During the Daily Scrum, the Development Team ‘Inspects the Progress on the Product Backlog Items’ using Sprint Burn-down charts by trying to answer:
- How does our pace of completion look to achieve the Sprint Goal?
- Are we comparing our progress with our forecast made at the beginning and how does it look like?
The Burn-down charts are plotted with the unit as Effort, Story points, or Product Backlog Item completion count. The unit for tracking is agreed upon by the Scrum team and monitored regularly.
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