My burndown chart considers remaining work from tasks in Done status

[Luiz Ferreira]

Currently my burndown chart is based on the remaining work of the stories I own.

What currently happens is that it is considering the remaining work of tasks that are already in the last column of the board.

Example:
A task in the column done has the remaining work of 6h. (I finished it before it was planned).

We have 5 more tasks (2h remaning each) in the column To Do or In Progress.

Our burndown shows the remaning work as 16h and it should be only 10h.

Can you help me, please?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Burndown does not look at remaining work.  It looks at what you committed to at the start of the sprint, and burns down the estimate on each issue you complete.  It doesn't matter if your estimate was wrong and you completed faster or slower.

You should not set your sprint to look at remaining estimates.  Could you confirm what field you are actually using for the sprint estimate?

[Heather Ronnebeck]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I was thinking maybe he was referring to the Epic burndown and not the normal sprint one. 

[Luiz Ferreira]

Hello @Heather Ronnebeck and @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , actually I'm looking at my Sprint Burndown, that's true.

I'm using a field called "Original Estimate" to add the estimate effort

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Thanks for checking that @Heather Ronnebeck - I had not thought of that!

With original estimate set as the sprint estimate, then I have a feeling this is still correct, but I can't be sure given the data you've given us.  The problem is that you're looking at remaining estimate, which the burndown does not.

I can fill in the missing bit which will then help me explain.  Taking the three issues you've defined:

	Original estimate	Remaining estimate	Status
ABC-1	10	6	Done
ABC-2	3	2	not done
ABC-3	3	2	not done

In this case, I would expect a burndown chart to start the sprint at 16 hours, and show a dip down to 6 hours when ABC-1 moved to "done".  The burndown is being done on the sprint estimate, the amount you've actually done is irrelevant.

[Luiz Ferreira]

Hello @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- , I think that I found the problem with our burndown.

Sorry for having inserted few details, I organized the ideas a little better and will explain below.

Actually we're adding information in both Original estimate fields (Issue and subtasks), I'm new to the team and I'm trying to change this.

Given that, we have this scenario:

 Original estimate Remaining estimate Status 
 ABC-1  10  6 In progress
 ABC-2  3  2 In progress
 ABC-3  3  2 In progress

The issues aren't done yet and the burndown looks after subtasks remaining time estimate. I want it to present actually how much work we still have, but considering that it is showing me this information plus the remaining estimate for each subtask, I can't.

Considering that, which option do you recommend that I should use in my burndown?

Thank you very much for all the support, I am updating JIRA usage and your help is very important to me.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, sub-tasks change it all, they are the problem.

Sub-tasks are not sprint items, and cannot be pulled into a sprint (as anything other than as a fragment of the story they are part of).  All the Agile reporting ignores estimates on sub-tasks, because that's not how Scrum or Kanban work.

Does your burndown make sense if you look only at the estimates on the stories?  (Not the accumulation from the sub-tasks)

[Luiz Ferreira]

Hello Nic,

Yes, that is the problem, nowadays we're adding our effort and time spent in each subtask, so I think that is the reason that creates a lot of problems with our burndown.

Because when we put a subtask as Done, the burndown keeps seeing the "Remaning work" from subtasks.

If we stop using estimates and time tracking in sub-tasks we're not going to have any problem. I think this is something that should be fixed in Jira (remaining work from resolved subtasks affecting the burndown) but I'll try to change the way that the team works.

I agree that we should only use Issue/Stories estimation and time tracking...

Thank you!!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is nothing to fix here, you should not be putting sprint estimates on non-sprint items.

There's nothing wrong with putting general estimates on them though.  Jira just doesn't have any built-in methods of connecting them to sprint estimates.

[Luiz Ferreira]

Agree Nic, thank you for all the help with that!

[Heather Ronnebeck]

Hi @Luiz Ferreira 

Welcome to the community. Do you happen to have your Done status tickets complete with a resolution or are they just changed to a Done status? The resolution would show beside the Status on the ticket view. 

I ask because I think that the burndown reports are showing only resolved tickets as done, so I think it's a good first step to validate the resolutions are being populated first. 

[Luiz Ferreira]

Hello @Heather Ronnebeck , actually all the items in the "Done" column have a log of resolved. I'm checking to see if I'm not making any mistake.