Wednesday, April 21, 2010

scrum-burn-down-charts-tasks-or-stories

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/369493/scrum-burn-down-charts-tasks-or-stories

There are several ways to do burn down charts in Scrum.
Some people suggest using the story points of unfinished stories left as your burn down charts in Scrum.
Pro: Only finished stories lower the chart
Contra: Chart doesn't move down in the beginning and then rapidly falls off
Others suggest to use the number of tasks left
Pro: Chart will move down, you can see if it is above the finishing line
Contra: You could move down to say 10 tasks left (hard tasks) in the end, and still have not one story finished. You've failed because only finished strories are good for your product owner.
Is the solution to have both a points-of-not-finished-stories and a not-finished-task chart?


In my opinion, tracking tasks is a rather suboptimal approach to tracking. In my experience, a story seldom really is the sum of its tasks - and often, while implementing a story, I find that the task breakdown was suboptimal, anyway.

Mountain Goat
Sprint Backlog: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/sprint-backlog