Burndown not reflecting Story Points remaining on Stories in To Do and In Progress columns

[ColinB]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand why one of our burndown charts appears to be including the points on Stories that are in the Done column on the sprint board.

We have 22 points in the To Do column, 43 in the In Progress and 30 in the Done Column, but rather than display 65 left in the Burndown it shows 95, which seems too coincidental to be adding up to 30 from anywhere else.

Looking at the sprint report shows stories coming in, some sizing done in the sprint, some stories taken out of the sprint, some completed to Done, some closed. All this is reflected in the Inc and Dec columns.

I'm curious to know what the query is that drives the Burndown Chart to ascertain where the values are coming from.

 Many thanks in advance for any help.

Cheers

Colin

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

"Burn" is about the points you have completed, not the points you have in to-do or in-progress.

Jira recognises completed points with a very simple criteria - the issue/story/item is in the right-hand column on the board.  It does not care what the name of the current status or the column is, "done" is just the last column on the board.

My guess is you have some column to the right of "done"?

[ColinB]

Thanks Nic. See above. :-)

[ColinB]

Hi Nic,

I have an update for you.

Firstly I discovered our workflow is a freeform, in that every status has All attached to it, meaning any status can move to any other status, so there's that...

What I did discover is that in the sprint report underneath the burndown it shows the points burned in the Dec and shows the points of any added in the increment column.

We had an 8 point story which went from our DOD Pending status to Closed. This was reflected by a decrement of 8. 

For reasons unknown to me currently, it was re-opened and moved to PO Accept which showed 8 in the increment column.

It then went from PO Accept to Done, but there wasn't a decrement of 8 in the Dec column, so the burndown remained 8 more than it should.

This contributed to the above mentioned story points that I expected to have been burned down.

Have you seen this before?

Cheers

Colin

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I have seen what you describe here, an d after a lot of digging, we worked out that Jira was doing it "right"  (not necessarily what people expected or wanted, but just correctly according to "agile")

[Yevhen Rohovets]

Hi

To view the report on tasks in different statuses, their lifetime in this status, you can use the Control chart
Burndown report shows how many Story points was planned and how many of them were completed (therefore, tasks from the Done status are shown), also, therefore, the report looks like a line that falls from left to right)

More about report you can read in this link https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/reporting-764478415.html

[ColinB]

First up, thank you for your prompt reply.

N.B. this applies to Nic's equally comments below. I think I need to clarify my understanding of the Burndown chart, and I've done many using a physical board where we burned down tasks in hours on post-its. I'll admit I've not used them much on JIRA, so there may be some nuances which differentiate it from a physical burndown.

An example would be, the team brings 80 points into a two week sprint. The grey guideline would start at 80 points on the left hand side and would reach 0 by the end of the last day. Not withstanding (assuming excluded) weekends it's a diagonal line.

The remaining values (red) would start at 80 on the Y-axis. Based on ten days of effort the guideline would expect 8 points per day.

If stories totaling, say, 13 points were completed by the end of day 1, the red line would extend to day 2 diagonally down to 67. This would result in the red line dropping under the guideline by 5.

If on day 2, nothing was completed, the red line would be flat, remaining at 67.

If a new (or more important) story of say, 3 points was added, and a (less important) equivalent wasn't removed, but 8 points were completed, the red line would drop to 62. If a less important story was removed, the red line would drop to 59.

My understanding of what constitutes 'Complete' depends on the statuses associated with the Done column of the sprint board. On the board for the team I'm endeavoring to help get a sense of how they're tracking to serve the Product Owner better, we have Closed & Done.

In our case we're almost at the end of the sprint. There are 65 points worth of stories not yet complete, i.e. not burned down, yet the red line is sitting at 95.

It just so happens, that the total number of points against the completed stories (in the DONE column) is 30, i.e. the difference.

Is this a reasonable representation of the way the burndown chart works in JIRA? Is there anything different, for example the way the guideline works, i.e. baselined at x number of points that would account for the anomaly I'm seeing?

Many thanks again. Will look into your suggestions.

Colin