Tracking Scrum Progress

If the project is critical, it is pretty common for your stakeholders to ask the team that how things are going on. This is good as people are invested in the outcome of project. But it can be a distraction for team if only some team members have the full perspective on how things are going.

Scrum addresses these challenges by posting Information Radiators. An information radiator is anything that you post on team sites that help everyone understand what you're doing and how it's going. It is a good practice to follow this approach to let stakeholder know what's going on in the project. It shows the stories committed to in the sprint, the tasks and their current status, and what tasks have been completed.

Another primary tool for sharing information on your progress is the sprint Burn Down Chart. The team, to measure how well they're executing the sprint, uses this chart. Where the task board tells you about task completion, it doesn't tell you how that compares to where you are in the sprint. A burn down does that.

Burn Down Chart

A typical burn down chart starts with a straight diagonal line from the top left to the bottom right, showing a burn down rate for the sprint. Lines or columns on the burn down chart may be used to represent the number of points of effort actually remaining in the sprint from day-to-day, starting with the work that team has committed to at the sprint planning. As work is completed, these columns should become shorter until they reach zero.

Below you will find a very simple Burn Down Chart:

The straight green line here, represents the ideal burn down rate. With each passing day of the sprint, efforts are put in to complete all the tasks.

The orange line with circles, represent the actual burn down. When the actual burndown is above the Idea burn down line, means that the team will miss the date for completion, and needs to add more people to increase the velocity.