How to Use Burndown and Burnup Charts

For Program Board (PI burndown), quarterly planning and other tips

Kendis Team avatar
Written by Kendis Team
Updated over a week ago

Burndown and burnup charts provide simple visualization of planning vs actual delivery. These charts are generally available in your Agile tools, e.g., Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps, however, they tend to show a single sprint at a time. PI or program-level charts are not available in your agile tool. With Kendis, you can access them under the Analytics section on your program boards.

Burndown Chart

This chart is based on the "Story Points" field, labeled at Kendis as "Estimate". In case you don't have any values to story points or estimate fields then data might not appear correctly.

The chart has 6 lines; by default, only the first 2 are visible. By clicking on the labels under the chart, it is possible to turn on and off other lines.

  • Plan: Ideal line for burn down based on the sum of story points.

  • Actual: Sum of done story points.

  • Committed Load: Sum of story points committed by teams at the start of each sprint

  • (Previous State) Load: Sum of story points in draft or planning state (in case you have changed the board state).

  • (Current State) Load: Sum of story points on the current board state, reflecting the latest situation.

  • Capacity: Sum of capacities from sprints in the current state

Burnup Chart

Utilizing the same data as in the Burndown chart, this shows the progress as burnup

Burnup with Plan and Actual

Burnup with Planning Load, Tracking Load, and Capacity

By turning off the other 2 lines and turning on the last 3 options, one can easily analyze how the story points have changed after planning and how's the latest capacity situation

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