How do I create a Burndown Chart using my Kanban board?

[Robert McFadzean]

I am using excel to generate a Burndown for a 6 week release, which is on a Kanban board. Is there an easy way I can generate the Burndown using the Kanban Board to display a report on the team wiki?

Even better, is it possible to create a gadget Kanban Burndown?

I know it would not be as accurate as a Scrum Board, but it will aid us tremendously in visualizing our bottlenecks.

[Derek Fields _RightStar_]

I completely agree that burndown makes sense for Kanban against Releases and Epics. Kanban teams should estimate their stories/tasks to provide some predictability and capacity planning information. Portfolio provides some of this, but Kanban boards should also provide this type of report.

[Deleted user]

I feel the same, and since I'm setting up a new Jira Cloud instance, my challenge would be compounded by trying or having to sell my management team on additional costs for add-ons (like Portfolio) to get the types of data touch-points they expected to get out of box with Jira Cloud.  

In short, a lighter thriftier solution would be best, but most of my searching thus far leads me to plugins and add-ons in the marketplace to augment the functionality we were expecting out of box. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Nope.  Burndown charts are for showing the estimated and actual work occurring in a sprint.  Kanban doesn't have sprints, so "kanban burndown" is basically nonsense.  Even saying "6 week release" implies you should be using a Scrum board because you are planning what is effectively a sprint.

Try the Control report though - that gives you a good indication of how your team is doing without needing a sprint to tie it to.  (I quite like the cumulative flow instead, it feels better for "how we're doing" at a glance)

[Janice Goodman]

Hi, I was hoping I might be able to get some help with this as well. We have multiple projects for different clients that we're servicing and since they are all small engagements, I have been trying to combine all of these into one. Since I have combined multiple projects into one, I am no longer able to create a sprint board and have been forced to create a Kanban board to manage them. We are still working in 2 week sprint cycles and I would still like to be able to pull some helpful data to interrogate our velocity and performance. Any idea how I can either run multiple projects on 1 sprint board or how I can generate burndown charts for the current Kanban board?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The problem you have with burndown is that it has to be time-boxed, which simply isn't there in Kanban.

However, you say "I am no longer able to create a sprint board" - why is that?  You should be able to create a new board, adjust its filter to include many projects and work off that.

[Siebe Bosch]

I don't understand why this is not possible. I would think that moving a task to "Done" would result in the stack of tasks at hand to reduce, thus showing the candle to burn down.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Again, velocity is how you perform against a set of goals during a set period of time and is used to compare with other non-overlapping periods of the same length. 

Kanban does not have a start or end date/time, or a commitment.  So there's no way to usefully define a velocity and hence burndown.  A burndown chart needs a start, an end, a measure of size, a flag for done, and a goal.  Kanban only has two of the five things needed for such a chart.

[Matthew Keenan]

This seems like a little short sighted. If I were to select a group of cards and a start time and a finish time why would I not be able to have a burndown chart? Who cares if the time lengths are the same as the previous chart? Cards are flagged as done once they are marked as done. Cards can be allocated a time estimate to complete. I can see a very easy way to do this without being caught in the straight jacket of "pure" scrum, or "pure" kanban. Tools are there to help people, not people there to help tools. Cart, donkey, et alia.

[Yolanda Repetto-Logan]

I agree! I am running kanban with my teams and they are now starting to size stories. I need to capture these metrics for an epic burndown. 

[amy walters]

Yes!  This is the challenge we have as well!

[Matthew Keenan]

We've decided to move to scrumban, but with a slightly more scrum than kanban, so we'd want to use burndown charts rather than WIP limits. But we'd like to use burndown charts not just as a reporting tool but also as a planning tool. It would be great if JIRA supported this (or at least made it easier for us to support ourselves).

[Deleted user]

Velocity is a useful metric even in pure kanban teams (assuming you are sizing your work), because it gives you another dimension to account for your work.  With variable timeframes defined at time of report creation I would like to believe that this could be done easily within Jira as an ad hoc report.

If it isn't the case, then I'm sure a lot of us will use the reports that are in Jira, and augment them with exports to feed offline velocity charts. 

For the sake of my users and stakeholders it would be a much better experience to not  switch between Jira and external dashboards/tools or files. 

I'm a few years removed from the last time I was in Jira all the time and I'm returning to the much improved Jira Cloud.  I'm going to do some research around custom report creation to see if I can build a report that will suit my (our) needs. 

If Atlasssian does change their minds, I'll check back on this thread later~ .

Thanks for the consideration and conversations in this thread everyone ^_^

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Robert McFadzea ,

You can do this with our Great Gadgets add-on (available for both Jira Server and Jira Cloud).

It offers a "Release Burndown Burnup Chart" dashboard gadget that is based on a filter. All you have to do is to create a filter that includes the issues from your Kanban project(s) or the filter used by your Kanban board.

It is very configurable, but this is an example of how the chart could look like:

For more details about how to configure it can be found in the add-ons documentation: https://bitbucket.org/StonikByte/great-gadgets-add-on/wiki/Home#!release-burnup-burndown-chart 

The add-on offers also a Kanban Velocity gadgets and Cycle Time Gadget that might be also useful for you. 

If you need help, please contact support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut. 

[jennifer smith]

I loaded this and tried it out.  its not bad.  i wonder why the velocity calculations are different between the 2 gadgets

Release Burnup burndown Chart veloctiy is 42.6 per interval

Kanban Velocity Gadget  Current Velocity is an average of the interval velocities but even if i took that highest velocity it would still be much less than 42.6 per interval

[Deleted user]

thanks for the heads up on this Jennifer.  I'll see how it operates in my company's instance. 

If there are variances across widgets, I'll need to know in order to communicate those differences to stake holders.

[Kumar K]

Hi @jennifer smith & @Danut M _StonikByte_  I would like to know how we can add  Great Gadgets to my Kanban  dashboard which i am using on MAC book pro..

Let me know steps how to add Great Gadgets .

Kumar

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Kumar K ,

Just take a look on the Great Gadgets documentation:

https://bitbucket.org/StonikByte/great-gadgets-add-on/wiki/Home#!how-to-use

I hope this helps.

Danut

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @jennifer smith

If you need any assistance regarding those numbers, please contact support@stonikbyte.com. It highly depends on how you configured the gadgets,  interval length, the dates, etc. Our support would be willing to assist if necessary.

Danut.  

[Oleksandr Katrusha]

For the sake of visualization, you may create a sprint with custom duration based on your estimates and project plan and include all issues into it.

Create another Scrum board and user corresponding reports. That's it :)