Work management
Burndown, velocity and flow
What the team finishes, how long things take, and the three ways these charts are usually drawn wrongly.
Every sprint has a report; the organisation has an insights page. All of it is derived from one reconstructed history, so the burndown and the flow diagram beside it cannot disagree — which is the usual failure when each chart replays the log its own way.
Burndown
Work remaining, day by day, against an ideal run. Three decisions make the difference between a chart people act on and one they learn to ignore.
- The ideal line runs from the commitment
- Not from today's scope. Anchored to current scope it moves every time somebody adds work, and the team is permanently on track no matter how much arrives. The commitment is snapshotted when the sprint starts and never revised.
- Scope is its own line
- Work added mid-sprint is the single most useful thing a burndown can show. Folded into the remaining line it becomes a flat spot somebody has to interpret.
- The ideal line steps on working days
- A straight line across a fortnight makes every team look behind on Monday morning, every week, for a reason that has nothing to do with them. Working days come from the same engine that computes sprint capacity — patterns, and public holidays resolved per person's jurisdiction.
The line stops at today
It does not continue to the axis. A line that reaches zero says the work is finished, and a report that lies in the direction of good news is the one nobody checks.
Items with no estimate are counted and reported, never treated as zero. A sprint where nothing is estimated says so plainly and shows item counts instead of drawing a points line that means nothing.
Velocity
Committed against completed, sprint by sprint, drawn as bars rather than a line — velocity is a set of separate observations, and a line between them implies a trend through points that are not a series.
The sprint in flight is excluded from the average
A sprint two days old has finished almost nothing, and including it drags the figure down at exactly the moment somebody is using it to plan the next one. On a two-week cadence it can halve the number.
A team that does not estimate has a velocity in items and no velocity in points. Reporting zero points would be false; reporting nothing at all would hide a figure they can genuinely use.
Cumulative flow
How much work sat in each band, day by day. Read for two things: the width of the middle band, which is work in progress and the thing a team can actually control, and the horizontal gap between bands, which is roughly how long an item takes to cross the board.
Counted in items rather than points, on purpose. An unestimated item moves across the board exactly as much as an estimated one, and weighting by points would make half a team's work invisible in the chart that exists to show it flowing.