Rapid Application Development: Forget Burndown Use Burnup Charts

Agile projects traditionally use burndown charts to visually show work remaining over time. This could be for the current iteration or it could be for the duration of the project. Either way they can help managers (or the Project Owner in Scrum) track velocity, estimate either the project or iteration completion date, or find trends in past performance. But burndown charts have a major shortcoming: they fail to show what makes agile projects agile – new requirements. And that’s where burnup charts come in. But first let’s examine burndown charts.