#4 – Burning Down

Authors comments:

With the global stock markets plummeting during the last week, the visual resemblances to burndown charts are clear.

A mature Scrum team has a good understanding of their velocity. The flow of these delivered Story Points can be seen as the actual burndown and can be compared to the predicted “ideal” burndown line on a sprint burndown chart.

There are numerous reasons for a team struggling to follow the ideal burndown; overcommitment, dependencies, PO unavailability, and an unrealistic DoD are examples. The burndown reflects all these issues, and it’s our responsibility as Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches to help teams overcome the impediments.