Advanced Release Burndown: "Now" point causing incorrect x axis scale?

Peter DeRosa (3●3●4) | asked Sep 04 '14, 2:32 p.m.

Am I confused, or does the "Now" point on the x axis of the v5.0 Advanced Release Burndown chart seems to ruin the x axis scale? Every point up until that point represents 1 sprint in time, then the chart inserts an extra point before the next sprint on the axis. Effectively, this gives you a width of 2 sprints when there is really only 1 in time.

Given that this report is visually supposed to allow you to trace a trend down to 0, doesn't that ruin the chart at it's most sensitive point?

In other words, we find ourselves saying "ignore that flat spot... it's not real" when we show it to stakeholders. Isn't looking for "flat spots" a huge part of the point?!?

Am I missing something here?

Sorry.. I'd post a picture, but don't have enough credibility yet:)

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Rafik Jaouani (5.0k●1●6) | answered Sep 05 '14, 8:30 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER

Peter, the x-axis on the Advanced Release Burndown report is not time scaled. So what you are saying is true only if your sprints have the same length. Think about this chart as having three independent sections: past data points, current data point and a prediction of future data points.
If you want a time scaled Burndown report, then use the new Burndown by Story Points report.

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Peter DeRosa commented Sep 05 '14, 9:08 a.m.

Thanks for the quick response. I understand the explanation, but am a bit shocked that this seems acceptable. I've never heard of this interpretation of an Agile "Burndown" chart. At the very least, it is totally out of synch with the Scrum community and I doubt anyone using RTC for Scrum would guess this is the intent. Probably would have been better to create a new chart and preserve the useful one for teams that use timeboxed iterations.

Technically speaking, does that mean you factor in the length of each iteration (past and future) when working out your forecasts (i.e. points/day or something)?

By "Burndown by Story Points" did you mean the "Story Points Remaining" chart? That one has no trend lines or forecasts at all, which unfortunately really diminishes it's usefulness to project management (anyone want to stick a ruler up on their monitor?). Maybe I'm not using the right chart?

Rafik Jaouani commented Sep 05 '14, 1:37 p.m.

JAZZ DEVELOPER

Peter, many of our users like the "Now" point as it is live and always up to date not requiring any recent ETL runs. I guess we could add a parameter to the report that would let you disable that point.
The "Burndown by Story Points" is a new report we shipped in 5.0. You can deploy it using the "Deploy new resources" button from the Report Resources WEB page.

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