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Release Burndown (Scrum)

By reviewing a release burndown report, you can understand how quickly your team has delivered backlog items and track how much work the team must still perform to complete a product release.

Note

This report requires that the team project collection that contains your team project was provisioned with SQL Server Reporting Services. This report is not available if Report Reports does not appear when you open Team Explorer and expand your team project node. 

In this topic

  • Data in the Report

  • Interpreting the Report

Required Permissions

To view the report, you must be assigned or belong to a group that has been assigned the Browser role in Reporting Services. For more information, see Add Users to Team Projects or Managing Permissions.

Data in the Report

As the following illustration shows, a release burndown graph shows how much work remained at the start of each sprint in a release. The source of the raw data is your product backlog. Each sprint appears along the horizontal axis, and the vertical axis measures the effort that remained when each sprint started. The amount of estimated effort on the vertical axis is in whatever unit that your scrum team has decided to use (for example, story points or hours).

Sreenshot showing a release burndown chart

You can filter the report by specifying the fields above the burndown graph:

  • Specify sprints from the Sprint list.

  • Specify area path from the Area list.

Required Activities for Tracking Work Items

For the burndown graph to be useful and accurate, your team must perform the following activities for tracking work items:

  • Define product backlog items and bugs, and specify the Iteration and Area paths for each.

    For more information, see Create and Modify Areas and Iterations.

  • Specify and update the Effort for each product backlog item and each bug that your team is working on.

  • Update the State of each product backlog item and each bug as it progresses from New to Done.

Interpreting the Report

You can review the report to determine the progress that your team has made in a release and to answer the following questions:

  • How much work remains in the release?

  • How quickly is your team working through the product backlog?

See Also

Concepts

Bug (Scrum)

Product Backlog Item (Scrum)

Other Resources

Scrum Process Template for Visual Studio ALM