Transparency is an important pillar of Agile. For the Agile team, this means that they hide nothing and everyone is aware of what is happening in the project. In the non-remote setup of doing things, we use a lot of physical information radiators, a physical Agile Dashboard (Task Board), where we would move paste-it notes on different columns drawn using markers, and often use a TV screen to display the metric charts such as velocity, sprint burndown, and release burnup charts.
Even in the absence of such a physical setup, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, such as Jira, can help keep the team informed about the work progress using visual burnup and burndown charts.
Despite their popularity and the fact that they serve similar purposes, I have often seen people confused about where to use them. There was perhaps no concept of “Agile” during Shakespeare’s time, but he too would have quipped, “To Burnup or Burndown: Tis the question!”. This article tries to demystify that. Both of these charts do have some differences in their focus and the information they convey; burnup denotes “work done” over time, while burndown refers to “remaining work.” But let’s do a deep dive.
Burnup Charts
Although the Scrum Guide doesn’t officially mandate “release planning” (you can read the reason towards the end of this article), any complex project would probably begin with that. Burnup charts are typically used at a bird’s-eye level (big picture) for tracking the progress of an entire project or a release (also often called feature charts) over a longer period of time. They show the total scope of work on the Y-axis and the amount of completed scope over time on the X-axis. This chart therefore enables the stakeholders to see not only how much has been accomplished but also the overall project scope. This helps in understanding whether the project is on track to deliver the planned features by the end of the release (aka the release goal).
Please read the rest of the article at https://agilechronicles.substack.com/p/to-burnup-or-burndown-thats-the-question to understand which chart is suitable for Sprint & Release tracking, practical tips for decide and other form of information radiators. Also get a downloadable Excel template FREE to create Burndown and Burnup chart in a breeze. Thanks!
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