Firstly, for those of you who don’t know what a Sprint Burndown is....
It is the chart that tracks available time in a sprint against the remaining work, as shown below. So we start at the beginning of the sprint at the top left hand side of the chart with all the work remaining (we haven’t done anything yet) and all the hours of the sprint available. We then progress towards the right (time) and downwards (completing work) until we hit zero, hopefully on or before the end of the sprint.



The chart is updated on a daily basis from the team’s estimation of the remaining work for the sprint. Therefore we can see at any given day in a sprint how we are “tracking” against the trend line to complete the sprint. Warning signs are lines that “flat line” or even start to rise in the Y- Axis. Teams almost always post the sprint down in a visible location on the team board and or electronically using either Excel or one of the many Scrum tools available such as Scrum for Team System (Conchango).

So that pretty much covers the Dr Jekyll persona of the Sprint Burndown. It’s awesome! It really, really does add value and its one of the “must have” artefacts of Scrum. So don’t let what I’m about to tell you put you off using it! It’s just a word of warning.

Enter Mr Hyde!
Ever heard management, Product Owners, Stakeholders say things like..

“Hey you guys didn’t complete the sprint!”
“You didn’t knock over all the sprint tasks!”
“We need you to successfully complete a sprint!”


Why do they say these things? Normally because the Sprint Burndown didn’t hit zero! For those of you who are now thinking “Hey, but that’s right!”. No its not, or should I say, it might not be. What we need to remember is that at the beginning of Sprint the team and Product Owner agree on a sprint goal, something along the lines of “Produce a web site to show our product catalogue”. Completing a sprint successfully, means successfully meeting this goal. It doesn’t matter if task #491 “Allow the customer to save searches” hasn’t been implemented. What does matter is that the team and the product owner agree that the goal has been met, and that means the Sprint Burndown may or may not be at zero!

Conclusion:
Remember the team and product owner should agree on a sprint goal during the sprint planning meeting. It is this goal that is used to measure the success of the sprint deliverable.
The Sprint Burndown chart is an invaluable tool to monitor and track task completion and progress during a sprint, but it should NOT be used to dictate the successful completion of a sprint.