[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsdGY04RrEk]

A common misconception about Agile is that there are a whole bunch of programmers coding like crazy, building whatever they feel like in a set period of time. Don’t mention the word Gantt Chart or MS Project, or you will be in serious trouble.

This actually could not be further from the truth.  SCRUM and XP, which are the two biggest Agile Methodologies use many tools and techniques to manage development – one of the most popular tools are Burn Down charts.

so what is it?

The purpose of the burndown chart is for your team to have a visual representation of the amount of work left to complete in the current iteration.  As the team “burns” through work, the line gets closer and closer to zero…..

In the example, the Red Line represents the Velocity. Velocity is a term used in Agile which represents the estimated amount of work that the team can usually deliver in a single iteration.  In this example, from the Velocity we can deduce that the team should deliver 25 points a day.

The blue line represents the “actual” units of work, or points left to complete in the iteration. On January 5th, there are 40 points left to complete, so this has not been a successful iteration!

It is interesting to see how closely the actual line is tracking to the velocity.  The example is a snapshot at the end of the iteration, however, if we rewind to 3rd January, it was looking quite clear that the team was tracking behind the projected velocity. This indication gives the team an opportunity to be proactive and possible push some stories into the next iteration or buy in some extra resource.

How do you create them?

If you are on a small project, with a co-located team simply put a big piece of butchers paper on the wall and plot your progress each day.

Once your project gets larger we recommend using an Agile Project Management Tool, like Bright Green Projects to automatically create burn down charts.  Bright Green Projects is free for a single user!