Came across this over the weekend. It’s a good read. Scrum is pretty standard practice in software development these days. It’s a great tool for managing task based work cycles to track how much gets done. Combine this with an iterative approach and you can begin to see trends in overall team productivity not to mention deliver working features on a regular basis.
This article and accompanying e-book provide some insight into how to interpret burn down charts. Obviously there’s an “ideal” burn down that teams are supposed to strive towards. What we don’t often do is properly interpret these charts during retrospectives to identify problems.
Agile is meant to be an adaptive process. We should be vigilant in assessing our process in order to maintain velocity and meet expectations. Without understanding what the chart is saying it’s difficult to make the appropriate changes.
I will be reviewing this article regularly to help understand what’s happening within my own project work.
Mike Berezowski 