Burn charts

We haven't talked about burn charts so far, but the idea is simple. You track and plot your current rate of progress in order to work out the trajectory of the project. This allows you to predict whether you're going to finish on time and on budget.

There are two ways to do this, with either a burn-down chart or a burn-up chart. While both methods are important aspects of the Agile development cycle and sprint planning, they are also widely used in general project management.

Burn-down charts

A burn-down chart's key strength is its simplicity. It tracks the number of fulfilled story points, use cases, or requirements versus the time or number of sprints spent to achieve it. This chart can also be used to track the financial expenditure of a project.

Starting with your entire budget on day one, you can track how much of it is remaining on a week-by-week basis. Then, by looking at the chart and considering the planned duration of your project, if your budget is decreasing faster than you expected, then you need to investigate why your burn rate is high.

In this case, it may be because a lot of the big expenditures were required in the project start-up stage, for example, initial buy-in costs such as new equipment and licenses, which is in the expected profile. Alternatively, it might perhaps be because of something unexpected, in which case you may need to request an extra budget.

You can see, in the preceding line graph, an example burn-down chart. The graph clearly shows, in a way that is visible to every team member, what is left to be done, what has been finished, and how this is impacting the planned schedule.

Burn-up chart

In comparison, a burn-up chart's key strength is the depth of information that it can present. A burn-up chart effectively illustrates the impact of any scope creep, which is the bane of many software projects.

In many ways, beyond just the name, a burn-up chart is similar to a burn-down chart in that it presents the same data, but in an inverted format. The advance is that it shows progress more clearly and logically as it goes up over time.

The main difference is the inclusion of a total scope line, which clearly demarcates where there may be scope creep. This line can also help to explain any significant change seen in the overall progress at that point in time.