TL;DR: Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns

A burn-down chart tracks the progress of a team toward a goal by visualizing the remaining work in comparison to the available time. So far, so good. More interesting than reporting a status, however, is the fact that burn-down charts also visualize scrum anti-patterns of a team or its organization.

Learn more about discovering these anti-patterns that can range from systemic issues like queues outside a team’s sphere of influence and other organizational debt to a team’s fluency in agile practices.

Scrum Anti-Patterns Visualized by Burn-Down Charts

Burn-down charts have become popular to provide team members as well as stakeholders with an easy to understand status whether a sprint goal will be accomplished. (Critics of the burn-down chart may note, though, that a scrum team should have a gut feeling anyway whether the sprint goal is achievable.)

Hence, this post is focusing on another useful aspect of burn-down charts: they are equally well suited to provide additional insights into all kind of impediments, both at a team level and at an organizational level.

The following graphs visualize four of the typical anti-patterns that can be easily detected with burn-down charts:

1. Late Acceptance

The product owner accepts or rejects tasks only late in the sprint:

This behavior may be rooted in various issues, for example:

The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide

This ebook covers over 160 Scrum anti-patterns, and it is available for free right here. Download the “The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide” now!

2. Slow Progress

In this case, the graph is located above the line of the expected progress for the complete sprint length:

There are several reasons why this might be the case:

Please click the “clapping hands” 👏, if you found this post useful–it would mean a lot to me!

If you prefer a notification by email, please sign-up for my weekly newsletter and join 14,583 peers.

3. Scope Increase

The scope of work increases over the course of the sprint:

Most of the time, this pattern can be attributed to inadequate preparation:

4. Early Finish

The team accomplishes the sprint goal way earlier than expected:

Of course, an early finish is the anti-anti-pattern if the team figured out how to deliver a task with much less effort than expected. Or the sprint goal could be achieved with fewer tasks that planned.

However, the positive news might also hint at some problems. Again, the reasons for this phenomenon are multi-faceted. My two top-candidates are:

Conclusion — Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns

It is a good idea to use burn-down chart patterns for the next retrospective as they easily identify team problems or systemic dysfunctions. And utilizing burn-down charts in that capacity does not even require switching to story points per se — equally sized stories can just be counted to create a dimension for the y-axis.

Enhancing burn-down charts with additional data, for example, context and occurrences, as well as lead time and cycle time values, will increase the benefit of burn-down charts even more.

Speaking of which: At the team level, I would suggest creating a rotating scheme of team members to update the burn-down chart daily. It is a team exercise and not the job of the scrum master.

Lastly, no matter what purpose you are using burn-down charts for, avoid falling into a common trap: Start counting subtasks. This accounting will quickly lead you on the track of abandoning your definition of done. Instead, you will start marking tasks as 90 % complete. Welcome to cargo cult agile — how would that differ from the waterfall approach?

What scrum anti-patterns that burn-down charts can reveal are missing? Please share with us in the comments.

✋ Do you want to read more like this?

Well, then:

Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns was first published on Age-of-Product.