How to correct burndown chart?

[Jeevabharathi]

Hi,

We are expecting burndown chart to be correct. Our statuses are Dev in progress, Dev completed, Ready for QA, QA in progress, QA completed, Ready for UAT, Moved to UAT, Moved to Pre-Prod and Moved to Prod(last status). On sprint last day we are moving all code to production, so status become Moved to Prod for stories planned in the sprint. Burndown chart become deep down from 60 story points to 0 on last day. Is there any way to 'correct' burndown chart without changing statuses?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Jeevabharathi -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

From how you describe your team's process, the burndown chart is correct.  The team is releasing to production in a batch, your definition of done appears to include releasing to production, and so the burndown matches that.  The built-in cumulative flow diagram may better indicate the progress measure you seek.  Please consider how you work if that is not acceptable to the team.

The board columns you describe seem more aligned to what would be used for Kanban, with "working" and "waiting" steps (although you seem to have some redundant columns, like "Dev Completed" and "Ready for QA").  With Kanban, work flows across the board and completes, with the minimum amount of work in progress (WIP).  There are often no iterations used.

Yet your team is using a Jira Scrum board with Kanban methods, while releasing in batches.  As Charlie described, only the last column on the board represents "done", whether using Scrum or Kanban.  If the team wants the burndown to reflect something different, they would need to consider other approaches, such as: separating build and release tracking, releasing in smaller chunks, etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Scott Theus]

It sounds like you are using the statuses to indicate which issues are ready to be put into production and which have been moved to prod. I suggest instead adding a custom checkbox field for "Moved to Prod" and take that status out of the workflow. That would allow you to create your prod releases by pulling everything that is in status "Moved to Pre-Prod" and does not have the "Moved to Prod" box checked.  

Once an issue is put into production the "Moved to Prods" box gets checked.

[Charlie Misonne]

Definitely something to consider. There are pros and cons to have them as separate statuses. The donwside of the statuses is your workflow gets more complex.
In my experience people like moving things around on a board, it is very easy and visual compared to editing a field.

Following this idea you could have 1 field named "deployed in" or "current environment" or anything similar and have the 3 values: UAT, Pre-Prod, Prod.

[Scott Theus]

I like having a visual way to move stuff around the board too.  But in this case it sounds like Jeevabharathi has a "done" status and a "done done" status, which supports dysfunction within the team. Stories are either done when they are delivered to the release team/process to package up and put into Prod or they are done when they go into Prod.  

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi @Jeevabharathi

The burndown chart will consider items as completed when they are in the latest column of your board. I assume Moved to Prod is the latest column of your board.

If you move all items to that column on a single day, indeed Jira will treat everything as done on that day and the burndown will have a deep drop.

A possible solution:

Create another agile board and only include the statuses you actually want to have in your burndown. I don't know if it is the case but if the items move to preprod during the sprint  whenever they are ready (and  not at the end) you could have that status in the latest column.
Items that move to the latest column on day 2 of your sprints will be visible as such in the burndown.

[Jeevabharathi]

Thanks all for your answers!

Let me check from my side and come back if I have any further queries.