One important concept under the Control Schedule process is the Burndown Chart. Burndown Chart is basically a graphical tool that helps you measure the progress of the project. It shows the total effort against the amount of work for each iteration.
Agile teams typically use the burndown chart aka iteration or sprint burndown chart. This gives a quick view of work left to do versus time for a given timeboxed iteration or, for understanding’s sake, a 2 week sprint.
Here’s a sample iteration or sprint burndown chart,
Each feature or functionality that the project team commits to is estimated in story points or simply tasks. The total number of story points is the starting number you see on the y-axis.
The blue line represents the remaining number of story points or tasks if the team accomplishes same amount of work each day. This is the ideal scenario. The red line represents the actual number of remaining story points or tasks.
Obviously, when the actual tasks remaining is higher than the ideal tasks remaining, you are late but if the actual tasks remaining is lesser than ideal tasks remaining you are early. The example illustrates both the cases.
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