Burnups Show You the Rate of Finishing

I don’t use Ideal lines for my burnups. I tend to measure features completed as the iteration proceeds. Sometimes teams like to measure story points instead. One team had trouble finishing its work during the iteration. As shown in the following figure, that team had a hockey-stick look for its burnup.

images/measurements/hockystorypoints.png

This next figure shows a team making steady progress toward finishing.

images/measurements/steadyprogress.points.png

However, measuring points is not necessarily measuring progress. Points are activity. Stories are progress. To see progress, measure finished stories. You might want to see how many points you complete also, to see what you finish. This first graph is still a hockey stick.

When you see hockey-stick completion in an iteration, address that in the retrospective. Does something prevent people from completing stories on a regular basis? You might see these causes:

  • Everyone takes his or her own story at the start of the iteration.

  • People get interrupted by other work that the team didn’t know about when it started.

  • The story was much more difficult than the team anticipated.

  • The team members perform asynchronous code reviews. That means people don’t want to interrupt their own work to review someone else’s work.

You might have other problems. Seeing hockey-stick completion helps the team realize something is not quite right. Once it knows that, it can retrospect and decide what to do.

As shown in the figure, the first team has the same number of points as before. This graph shows when the team completes stories.

images/measurements/hockey.stick.points.stories.png

The next graph shows the same steady-progress data for the second team, and we can see when the stories complete, not just the points.

images/measurements/Steadyprogress.points.stories.png

Burnups or burndowns with story points only help teams learn how they work now, and how they might work a little while into the future. Teams need to measure more than story points. When they measure feature progress, they are able to report progress to other people who want to know where they are.

storiespoints points velocity Points Are a Capacity Measure

In the same way as velocity is a capacity measure, measuring points is about the team’s ability to measure its capacity and then fulfill what it thought it could deliver. (See ​Velocity Is a Capacity Measurement​.)

All the way through this book, I’ve suggested the team create and refine stories so that each story is a team-day or less. If you choose not to do that, and your stories are larger than a 1 (a team-day), you might need to use velocity. I would make my stories smaller, but that’s me.

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