Burndown Chart

Definition:
The Burndown Chart shows the amount of work that has been completed and the amount of work remaining at any given time during the project development. A Burndown Chart is a tool that people use to get information about the work that has been completed and the remaining work. The teams can use the burndown chart as a prediction tool to visualize when their project is completed. Burndown charts also provide insights regarding the health of the sprint. Upon reflection of the burndown chart, teams are given insights about loopholes in the processes. The team can then determine solutions to overcome the problems, leading to meaningful outcomes.

Burndown Chart
What is a Burndown chart?

A Burndown Chart is less exclusive and expensive than a Gantt chart or a kanban board. Unlike a Kanban board or a Gantt chart, it does not focus on every detail. Instead, it focuses on how much time is remaining till the completion of the project. It uses two factors to predict the time needed to complete a project, i.e., the amount of remaining work and the amount of time available to complete that work.

In this chart, the amount of work is represented by the y-axis, and the amount of time is represented by the x-axis. The time includes the period from the beginning to the expected end of the project. It is shown to everyone on the board and is updated regularly to keep it accurate.

The Need of Burndown Chart:

A project team may need to create a Burndown Chart to determine the amount of work completed in a given amount of time and the work and time remaining. Once the project has been divided into multiple small tasks and all the tasks have been assigned the amount of time needed to complete them, a line is created to reflect the number of working hours needed to complete the project.

The project team may need a burndown chart to:

• Determine the amount of work done in each sprint.
• Display the completed work.
• Visualize the remaining work.
• Predict the timelines for the completion of the project.

Creating a Burndown Chart:

Creating a burndown chart is a multi-step process. These steps are as follows:

Step 1: Creating the Estimated Effort:

In this step, you are supposed to estimate the effort needed to complete a milestone or a sprint within the given time. Note down the number of days available and the number of hours to complete a particular task. Now, divide the effort with the time available daily. This way, you will be able to do better time management.

Step 2: Tracking the Daily Process:

You should keep an eye on the process of a particular sprint. Capture the progress of each task in the burndown chart.

Step 3: Compute the Actual effort:

After you have captured the daily effort for each task during the working hours, you now need to note down the remaining effort needed to complete a particular task.

Step 4: Create the Final Dataset:

Once you have all the data available, you can use the line chart option in MS Excel to obtain the final dataset.

Step 5: Plot the Burndown Chart Using the Dataset:

Now that you have the final dataset, you can easily plot the burndown.

Benefits of Burndown Chart:

• The burndown chart enables you to see the project’s progress without searching anything. It allows you to visualize your current progress and the required progress immediately.
• It lets you see the problems and the chances of failure in advance. You can then take the measures to tackle those problems or speed things up to get back on track.
• It keeps everyone on a single note by its simplicity. Not everyone on the team is efficient enough to read the complex charts, so the burndown chart represents the data in a simple way that everyone can read and translate.