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I am looking for a program that can make burndown charts which does not assume that just because a day passes by, all work time for that day automatically is assumed to have turned into progress for the current sprint. I am thus not particularly interested in finishing a sprint at some specific date, however I am interested in keeping track of if the estimate is accurate.

I am only intending to use this for private programming (and non-programming) projects, so it does not have to be a full fledged scrum team solution (although I assume it would be).

To better explain what I am looking for, let's imagine I have a project "Paint my house" with a single sprint consisting of nine tasks:

  1. Buy paint, brushes and cleaning liquid.
  2. Wash the North wall.
  3. Wash the West wall.
  4. Wash the South wall.
  5. Wash the East wall.
  6. Paint the North wall.
  7. Paint the West wall.
  8. Paint the South wall.
  9. Paint the East wall.

Since this will be done in my spare time, at any day I might down-prioritize this and do other stuff. And the painting is highly dependent on the weather as well. Therefore a calender day passing does in absolutely no way imply that the project will make progress for that day.

Every single application that I have found that can make burndown charts fails utterly to fit this scenario. They all assume "calender time passing equals progress". I want to supply the expected progress manually.

Any suggestions for a tool that is able to handle a project in this way?

(Related questions, but which does not provide me with an answer to my question. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/829497/agile-methods-specifically-taylored-to-working-solo, How have you implemented SCRUM for working alone?, Using Scrum on a "Personal Time" Project)

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hlovdal
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2 Answers2

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Every single application that I have found that can make burndown charts fails utterly to fit this scenario.

That's because the whole point of a burndown chart is to predict when the sprint will finish, and to know whether you're on schedule or not. If you cannot paint because it rains, then you cannot make progress and you're then behind schedule, as the burndown chart will show. But if you make time a variable, then you have no schedule -- progress becomes independent of time -- and the trendline is completely unpredictable. So there's no point of having a burndown chart if the progression of time is unknown.

vocaro
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  • I see your point, a burndown chart will (perhaps mainly) show if you will finish at some specific tiime (which I am not interested in). But it will also show if progress is more or less than estimated (which I am interested in). Let's say that I measure work effort put in in hours and work done in points. Then one week might as an example be Monday 3 hours & 3 points. Wednesday 1 hour & 0.5 point. Saturday 8 hours & 10 points. Usually the applications all assume 8 hours every day Monday to Friday. I just want to to be able to set that manually. – hlovdal Jun 13 '11 at 05:04
  • I agree that the point of a burn down chart is for scheduling but I like the idea of a similar chart as hlovdal has described. It would measure how effective I am when working on a project (in my free time for example). It would still be valuable in measuring effort remaining – i8abug Jun 16 '11 at 02:13
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I think you are looking for something like kanban instead of scrum.

Here's an example of a chart in kanban. http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2010/02/cumulative-flow-chart-in-kanban-real-usage-example.html

HTH (6 months later)

jfabre
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