StarTeam and Burn down Charts
To steer a car, assuming the vehicle is functioning correctly, a driver needs to be able to see where they are, where they are going, and have some idea of how fast they are moving. Burn down charts used in Scrum, and widely adopted in eXtreme Programming too,
Continued from StarTeam and Releases and Iterations...
StarTeam and Burn down Charts
To steer a car, assuming the vehicle is functioning correctly, a driver needs to be able to see where they are, where they are going, and have some idea of how fast they are moving. Burn down charts used in Scrum, and widely adopted in eXtreme Programming too, make these three items visible to the team as they try to steer the project to the desired destination.
Although variations abound, burn down charts are essentially bar charts or line graphs with the x axis showing time and the y axis showing how much work it is estimated that there is left to do. They can be plotted for an iteration, for a release, or for the whole project if required.
Figure 8 shows a simple but typical burn down chart for an iteration. The graph is plotted at the end of each day after the team have updated the number of hours left for the items they are working on. The graph shows the amount of work left to do (where the team is). It also shows where the team wants to go, having no work left to do by the end of day ten (0 on the y-axis). Finally, the general slope of the graph gives an idea of how fast the team is moving (during the iteration extrapolating the graph until it hits the x-axis indicates whether the team is on target or not).
Figure 8: A burn down
chart
StarTeam and Burn down charts
StarTeam includes a number of charting and reporting features. Unfortunately, none of them can produce the sort of burn down chart that is needed.
The simplest way to create a burn down chart from the data in StarTeam is to use StarTeam’s export functionality at the end of each day to export the hours left for each task to a delimited file. This can then be used to populate a spreadsheet column, and the spreadsheet’s graphing features used to produce the burn down chart. After the work needed to create the spreadsheet initially has been done, exporting and updating only takes a couple of minutes at the end of each day.
A more sophisticated approach is to build a custom export utility using StarTeam’s open software development kit (SDK) that either populates a spreadsheet automatically or uses some other charting toolkit, Eclipse’s BIRT for example, to produce the burn down chart.
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