I'm burning up

Some time back I talked about keeping progress visible using burn-down and burn-up charts. At the time I said:

I can't decide whether I prefer the burn-up or the burn-down chart ... I think the burn-down chart is more emotionally powerful because reaching zero has special significance for me, motivating me to push ahead and complete my work.

Almost a year on, I've decided to switch to the burn-up chart. I still feel that, psychologically, the burn-down chart and working your way down to zero is more powerful than working your way up to 100% done. But I got fed up of redrawing the chart to shift the x-axis down every time the number of story points in the iteration changed. It's easy to do this in a spreadsheet, but I don't like creating big visible charts electronically.

In the current project, we're drawing our two charts - burn-up chart and running tested stories chart - on a whiteboard with a grid background.


burnupandrtf
Originally uploaded by sjb140470.

These charts are big, visibile and easy to update. The blue and green magnets identify 100% done in pair days and running tested stories, respectively.


Tags: burn-up chart, extreme programming

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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