Tuleap offers a powerful open source project management tool, for agile or waterfall-oriented projects.
From Tuleap 9.17, you can enjoy a burn-up chart in addition to the Burndown. What is this new powerful feature? How to read it like a pro? How to configure it into Tuleap?
Burn up, effective chart to understand what’s happening
What is a Burn up chart?
Two key lines
A Burn up chart tracks progress towards a milestone’s completion. The vertical axis is amount of work, in points. The horizontal axis is time, measured in weeks in the screencap above.
A Burn up chart shows both completed work and milestone scope
The graph displays three different lines:
- Total effort line : it is the milestone scope line, a release or a sprint for example.
- Team effort line : it is the completed work: stories, tasks, fixed incidents for example.
- Ideal line : it is the theoretical line. It shows the completion necessary at each day to meet the deadline.
Understanding the scrum Burn up chart
How to read a Burn up chart
Each day you can see the amount of work completed and the total amount of work. The distance between the two lines is the amount of remaining work . The project will be completed when the green and red lines meet.
With the same idea of the Burndown chart, but a different vision, the Burnup chart is a powerful measure of how close the team is to complete the release or the sprint.
Burndown and Burn up : the difference
To be short:
- the burndown shows the remaining effort
- the burn up displays the completed work towards the goal
Tuleap Scrum Dashboard : the new “Overview” tab of a Release. The key information about the Release are summarized here: content, Burn up, Burndown
The burndown chart is a single line racing towards zero as the milestone is completed. It is easy to understand. However it can hide important information, notably the effects of scope change e.g. if work is added or removed.
In the burn up , the total work line shares important information. The planned items can be not yet completed because work is more complex than estimated, or too much new work has been added. This information can be crucial at retrospective for understanding and rectifying difficulties encountered during a milestone.
Checking progress charts regularly is an important part in project management, whatever your team is working in agile or not.
Burn up chart: new in Tuleap
In Tuleap, Burn up is provided in the Agile Dashboard module. You have this plugin to be installed on your platform and activated in your project workspace to create this chart.
How calculation is done
depends on your Scrum planning configuration.
Let’s say your Release planning configuration allows to add User stories and Bugs as below.
For the creation of the Burnup chart, only the associated trackers configured as above will be taken into account. The two lines of the chart will be based on the calculation of effort:
- the red line is the sum of the initial effort of User Stories and Bugs
- the green line is the sum of the completed effort of User Stories and Bugs. Completed effort is a new computation done into Tuleap.
How to create a Burn up chart in Tuleap?
The Scrum template provided into Tuleap Agile Dashboard has been updated so that you do not need to configure by hand all the following.
If you create a new Scrum workspace, use the new Scrum template to get easily Burn up.
If you have an existing Agile Dashboard, you should follow the above guidelines to create a Burn up chart.
Update Release tracker
To create a Burnup chart in your project, you need to configure the Release tracker or any other milestone tracker (Sprint for example). Go in the administration part of the tracker. In the field usage part:
- Burn up field : add one new dynamic field “Burnup chart”. There is a normal warning messaging asking you to set the semantic of the linked trackers.
- Start date:, create a field with the name “start_date”
- Duration: create a field with the name “duration”
- Capacity: create a field with the name “capacity
Updated linked trackers
To remove the alert message display in the Release tracker, you have to customize the associated trackers (as configured in the Scrum admin). In this example, it is necessary to customize the “User Story” tracker as well as the “Bug” tracker. For both, go in the tracker Admin/Semantic :
- Initial effort: choose the field you want to use
- Done: it’s also a semantic, based on Status semantic. Here choose the values of “status” to be considered to be “Done”
Tuleap offers now several charts to help agile teams track the project progress. Burndown and Burn up give a deep understanding of the product status and the effort made and remaining.
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