Overview

A burndown chart displays the amount of work in a sprint that still remains and also the work that has been completed. This is a big help for your team because they can handle the progress, predict if they can finish the goals and make them aware of scope changes.

  • In the horizontal axis (x axis) the period of time in days that the sprint lasts.

  • In the vertical axis (y axis) the amount of work planned for the sprint in the estimation statistic you choose when configuring the gadget. The unit of measurement can be: Story points, story points estimate, original time estimate or issue count.

Learn about Configure estimation and tracking in classic boards

The lines in the chart:

  • Remaining work: The green line represents the total amount of work left in the sprint, according to your team's estimates in either story points, story points estimate, original time estimate or issue count. Here you should check if it increases, which indicates scope creep i.e., growth in the scope of the sprint.

  • Guideline, the blue line. This line is a guide for your team to approximate where they should be to finish the work on time, provided the work was done in a linear progress. The ideal amount of work left or ideal burn rate.

Not to mention that ideally, your team’s green line should be below the blue line. Meaning that they are on track to finish everything online before the end of the sprint.

Configuration

Name your gadget meaningfully, so everyone knows at a glance when to use it. Fill out the rest of the fields as applicable, namely:

  • The datasource, where Current indicates the Jira instance where the app is installed.

  • The project and the board where the sprint is. Only works with a single sprint, parallel sprints not supported yet.

  • The estimation statistic, choose how your team estimates the how much work is committed in a sprint:

    • Story points (company-managed projects, former classic projects). Your team will burn down the story points estimations they did in the backlog

    • Story points estimate (team-managed projects, former next-gen projects). Your team will burn down the story points estimations they did in the backlog.

    • Original time estimate. Your team will burn down the time estimations they did in the backlog i.e., duration of the issues in hours or days in the Original Estimate field.

    • Issue count. Your team will burn down the number of issues completed. And they won’t need to enter estimates in the backlog.

  • Finally, indicate if you want to use the current settings for all the compatible gadgets in the dashboard. This option eases the pain of configuring one by one the rest of the gadgets with the same default configuration.

Integrations

  • :jira_software:

We are working on our growing catalog of Dashboard Gadgets: KPIs and Metrics, but drop us a line in case you want us to expedite a specific one, visit our Help Center.

Dashboards

This gadget appears in the following dashboard: Scrum Software Team template

See also