BurnUp

Introduction

Provide stakeholders with a realistic expectation of when they can expect delivery of a release. The chart clearly shows that there are two key variables that determine the ‘Landing Zone’ for a project; The Scope and the Throughput rate (velocity). Showing the business that they can directly influence the delivery dates is a key part of engaging them in collective responsibility for project deliverables.

From experience the rate at which Scope continues to grow is a real surprise for most teams - increasing awareness of this fundamental aspect of a project is key to influencing the outcomes.

The chart is so simple to comprehend that many clients use it to report up to the highest level stakeholders in the organisation.

Project Data Settings[edit]

Selecting the data

Select the project, version(s) and component(s). Decide which Issue types you want to include - and hit load.

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Chart Settings

Having loaded the data you can refine some of the key parameters of the chart. All of these settings are saved with the chart and therefore only need to be done once for a project or release.

Field	Description
Data interval	Select the frequency you want to sample the historical data - in days
Date range	Choose the start date of the chart. The end date will default to 'today' and roll forwards - unless you fix it with a specific date
Done States	Decide which states represent 'Done' for you team. This will be used to work out the lower red throughput line.
Manual Throughput	You may want to override the calculated historical throughput rate e.g. in the early stages of a project, before the team's throughput has stabilised. You can enter a value here of the number of effort points the team is expected to finish per interval (as set above)
Manual Range	Use this to set the spread of the forecast optimistic and pessimistic lines (if you have used the manual throughput rate). You can set the Standard Deviation manually, e.g. if you don't yet have enough history to calculate the SD. This number will then be used to draw the optimistic and pessimistic forecast lines.
Estimated Size	The chart calculates average item size based on history and uses this for all unestimated items You can override this with an estimated size
Hide and apply chart settings	This will do a reload based on your new chart settings - and then hide the data selection panel.
Hide settings	Hides the panel without reloading the data

	Field	Description
Throughput Settings
	Sample	Choose how much of the project history you want to include to calculate the mean throughput rate (velocity) '75%' will use the last 75% of sample interval velocities to calculate the mean
	Optimistic	Optimistic will calculate the higher throughput rate, as a standard deviation from the mean. 15 will provide 0.15 standard deviations from the mean
	Pessimistic	Pessimistic will provide the lower throughput rate, also using standard deviations from the mean.
Scope Growth settings
	Sample	Choose how much of the project history you want to include to calculate the mean Scope growth rate '75%' will use the last 75% of sample interval velocities to calculate the mean
	Upper	Determines the rate at which the rate of scope growth slows down. So, 10% means that each interval (set above) the rate of growth is reduced by 10%. The same is applied to subsequent intervals, until the rate of growth is 0%
	Lower	As above - however this determines the lower scope forecast. If this is set to 100% then it gives a straight line.

Display Options

These are not saved to the database but are personnel preferences as a user is looking at a chart.


Show Count/Effort	This enables you to toggle between Count of the number of items or the total effort - on the Y axis
Show/Hide unestimated items	Toggles between showing/hiding the number of unestimated items in the backlog.
Show/Hide bugs	Toggles betweeen showing/hiding the number of bugs in the scope backlog
Hide Title data	Hides the table that summarises what settings were selected in the creating of the chart
Data x days old - refresh	In order to speed up this chart we cache the last saved version of it. This could have been several days earlier. Click this button to refresh the data in the chart.

Interpreting the output