What Is Burndown Chart?

Once referred to by Alan Kay as the "mother of all demos", burndown charts are a great tool to help you track work completed against the time allowed. As with everything else agile, don't be too dogmatic about making your burndown chart, but remember that it will probably not be deadly accurate. You're not building bridges here - just working hard and having fun doing it with your team! Usually, burndown charts show how much work is left and how much time is left before the project is completed. The most common form of a burndown chart is a line graph, which depicts the reduction in work overtime. Burndown charts are constructive for keeping track of project progress and can be used by project managers to determine if the project will be completed on time, late, or even if the project needs to be shut down. Burndown charts are standard in the software industry for showing the progress of work done toward a deadline. They're also used in project management, game development and hardware design. Burndown charts can contain one or many elements. The most basic type has just a horizontal axis representing time (usually weeks) and a vertical axis representing the remaining work. It also shows how much work has been completed against how much remains until the end of the project. The burning down chart is a tool in project management. It advocates that tasks can only be accomplished after some time, and there will always be a slack time when the team is ahead of schedule. The ideal line is an even, straight line starting from the maximum amount of work to zero work on the deadline and shows a uniform distribution of work done by the team when they proceed with their tasks. Nine out of 10 times, it doesn't happen this way because things happen unexpectedly like this team saw someone's desk needed organizing or had an unexpected meeting.