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Advanced burndowns for multiple teams and releases / milestones
Advanced burndowns for multiple teams and releases / milestones

Visualize work in progress and predict if you will finish on time

Dovidas Baranauskas avatar
Written by Dovidas Baranauskas
Updated over 10 months ago

A burndown chart shows a graphical representation of the number of cards that need to be completed versus time. It allows you to see an estimation for when all cards on a board will be completed based on your team’s velocity over the past three days. The burndown chart is often used by teams working in sprints or short projects with clear deadlines. Those teams aim to complete all cards on the board within 2-4 weeks and, therefore, want to predict if they will finish on time.


Working in sprints, visualizing burndowns

Teams working in sprints usually decide how much work they will take on during a ‘Sprint Planning’. All cards for that upcoming sprint are pulled from the planning backlog to their team board, this action will create a burnup.

To view the burndown widget, open the menu (...) on the right side of the board and select Dashboard view. Add widget and from the list, select Burndown. in this menu you can select to add Filters/Boards/Date range/Burn down by custom fields/Timezone and Show Ideal line.

During the sprint, team members assign cards to themselves and pull them forward once they have capacity to do so. As cards are completed and reaches the rightmost column, the widget will start trending downwards. You can add an ideal burndown line that shows how fast you would ideally work in order to complete all cards before the sprint ends or before the project is due. If you compare the ideal line (green) with the predicted line (red dotted) you can see if you’re on the right track.

Once the sprint is over you can see if the team managed to complete everything they had committed to. The burndown chart should in that case have reached all the way to the bottom, indicating that there are no cards left to be completed.


Backlogs with filtered burndowns

While working on backlogs, it is important to know what exactly is happening with different releases. Looking at a backlog may be hard to notice and review each release and its completion state.

By choosing the burndown widget, it is possible to filter it by each tag that can represent a release. That way, having a better understanding of each release's progress.

Applying different filters for each release, you can have multiple burndowns in one screen showcasing overall progress from the same backlog board. This can expand the visibility and provide much-needed feedback on delays and predictions.


Working with multiple teams

In Favro, you can now select multiple sources for the burndown. Can choose multiple boards to be added in as a source of truth for one main burndown, by simply choosing Boards menu. Add the wanted boards and also include if you want different completion stages for each board.

In the example, by having all three different team boards in one burndown, we can predict when it would be completed according to all three team velocities. It can provide significant insights into the overall progress that is divided between multiple teams or departments. This is a Favro unique feature.

You can also choose a different Timezone when working with multiple teams in different time zones.

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