The Burn Up Chart

 For a long time, I was satisfied and there by used only the Burndown charts to track progress of sprints. This is until I read more about the Burnup chart and the whole gamut of values that it brings.

What is a Burn Up Chart?

You want to track the progress of your sprint every day. (ie) you want to know how many story points you have finished on each day and how many are left out to complete the sprint. You have decided to track it in the form of a chart. A Burnup chart does this exactly. We plot the number of story points completed each day and there by see how good/bad we are in a position to complete the story points within the sprint timeline.

The advantages of this chart are:

1. It shows any scope changes immediately, unlike a burndown, where it can be easily missed. This is very useful in identifying scope creep, as the chart always shows the changed scope at the top of chart, which the team would then know that as either 'scope creep' or revised target for that sprint

2. It helps Product Owners to understand the velocity and help visualize the day of completion if a few story points are to be added.

Now if you see the graph below, the above points can be inferred easily and quite accurately.

3. The other way to see the burn up chart is that we can measure the value delivered along with the story points delivered. Remember that in scrum, the result is not based on # of stories or # of story points, it is rather the amount of value that we deliver.

Assuming that in the above scenario of 50 points we have 10 stories, 5 with high values (5 points each) and 5 with low values (2 points each). The net value to be delivered in this sprint is 35. Again using this chart the total value delivered at a given point of time can be found.