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Our company relies heavily on burndown charts to track the progress of the different teams. One issue we are facing is that the 'ideal' trend is a straight line that goes from the initial capacity to 0 and that does not represent what the team can do.

If there are days off for example the line should be able to represent that, or if some team members have 'off-topic' tasks not entered in the planning the line should represent that too.

Is there any tool capable of that?

halfer
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Ignacio Soler Garcia
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  • @VadimKotov: a great contribution to the site. Thanks for improving it. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 02 '17 at 15:10
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because [project management is now off-topic on Stack Overflow](//meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/343829/is-stack-overflow-an-appropriate-website-to-ask-about-project-management-issues/343841#343841). Ask these questions on [SoftwareEngineering.SE](//softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/) and [ProjectManagement.SE](//pm.stackexchange.com/) instead. (Unfortunately, this question is too old to be migrated.) – robinCTS Oct 29 '17 at 17:39
  • @robinCTS: i don't get what you (moderators) are doing. What's the benefit of this work? What's the improvement on the site? Who cares if an old question that can't be migrated is closed or not? – Ignacio Soler Garcia Oct 30 '17 at 08:28
  • I'm not quite a moderator, just a lowly reviewer ;) What we are doing is some house cleaning. Project management has been off-topic for a long time now, but there are a still a few (~250) old posts around. These will be closed and then deleted. The benefit/improvement is so the site only contains on topic questions and answers. People googling for project management related topics will end up being directed to the appropriate sites instead of ending up here and asking new (off-topic) questions. As for who cares, some people are preservationists and want to keep everything around for the… – robinCTS Oct 30 '17 at 11:04
  • …benefit of others (or themselves). I could have been a bit clearer with the last sentence, but I was running up against the length limit of a single comment. What I meant to say was - *If you wish to have this question retained you have to manually repost it on one of the appropriate sites. If you wish to retain some/all of the answers as well, you need to either ask the authors to repost them as answers to your new question, or repost them yourself. Unfortunately, this question, and the answers, are too old to be automatically migrated to the appropriate site*… – robinCTS Oct 30 '17 at 11:05
  • … *If you couldn't care less, please ignore this comment and sorry for disturbing you.* – robinCTS Oct 30 '17 at 11:05

3 Answers3

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Scrum is designed for teams with dedicated members. I often recommend that team members who are less than 50% dedicated to the project be considered chickens: their time is not counted, they can get any amount of work done, but they only do so while working with a pig. The mostly-dedicated pig uses the chicken as one of many ways to get work done, but in the end, the pigs are committed and the chickens are only involved.

In my experience, for anyone who is 50% or more dedicated to a project, their outside work usually is distributed evenly enough that any unevenness is not worth worrying about. If someone is away for the second half of the sprint, we just know that we should probably be a bit below the line for the first half of the sprint without having the burndown show it.

I always do a burndown with Excel, so occasionally I have fudged the "ideal" line formulae to reflect a gross discrepancy due to vacations, but this has been rarely needed.

Patrick Szalapski
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  • This was the feeling I had and that's how we are proceeding but I thought that maybe someone already addressed these issues. Seems that 'no' is the answer this time :) I accept the answer as it currently points out that seems to be no tool for doing this. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Nov 24 '14 at 08:55
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The purpose of the "ideal" trend in burndown charts is to show the progress of the team if they were working in a perfectly sustainable and constant and focused delivery pace. That hardly ever happens of course. Sometimes you're stuck and need help, sometimes you go faster than expected etc... And that's the whole point. This "ideal" line in burndown charts lets you detect very quickly if you are susceptible of running late, or if you're running early. The earlier you know that the better.

I sense there is an underlying problem behind your question. I don't believe burndown charts are your problem, they're just a tool. When you say "that does not represent what the team can do", do you mean your team usually runs late? How do you deal with velocity in your team and company? How about lowering velocity expectations the next sprint?

As for "off-topic" tasks, I believe your scrummaster or your agile coach should be there to protect you from it. Her job is to protect you from being driven away from the next most important thing.

So I guess the question is not wether there is a tool that matches how things are working in your team but rather, "can you tell us more about how your team works?", then we might be able to help you find some answers.

Back when I started digging in all this Agile stuff, I got a lot of good haha moments reading the book "Agile Estimating and Planning" by Mike Cohn. You might want to take a look at it.

Hope that helps.

Marc Lainez
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  • Some people is working on the team only the 50% of their time as the other time are working on a different team and there is the issue with the days off of the people due to vacation, bussiness trips, etc. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Nov 12 '14 at 08:15
  • I see. There are different approaches to it but I guess the more relevant one here is taking this absence of focus and anticipating the off days in the velocity. In his free book "Scrum and XP from the trenches", Henrik Kniberg introduces the concept of focus factor when estimating. Maybe that could be something worth trying. Again, I really think the problem is on the way you deal with estimations, not the burndown chart tool itself (http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches) – Marc Lainez Nov 12 '14 at 16:01
  • But to be completely honest with you, I think it's always better to have one 90% focused person on the team rather than two 45% focused people. But I don't know how things work in your company and that might not be something you have influence on. Switching from one project to another is a huge productivity killer. – Marc Lainez Nov 12 '14 at 16:03
  • I agree but there is no option. Some people is focused on new product development and some others have to maintain legacy products too using 50% of their time. – Ignacio Soler Garcia Nov 13 '14 at 08:02
  • Then try applying a focus factor as described in Henrik's book. I think that it would help you be more realistic regarding the velocity of your team. Management might not like it because your velocity might drop but at least you'll be honest about it and become more predictable. – Marc Lainez Nov 13 '14 at 14:47
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We've found similar issues, and most tools (Jira, TFS etc) do not calculate this.

The simplest solution - go old school and draw it by hand. It takes 5 minutes and there and you have to update manually, but it works well for us.

You can sill use your tool to calculate remaining effort so the hand drawn chart is accurate.

Also, if someone is sick we usually adjust the total effort down by taking something out of the sprint backlog roughly equivalent to what that person would have done on that day. It's not ideal, but at least it normalizes the chart.

walbuc
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