Zenhub News

Zenhub Presents Burndown Charts and Velocity Tracking in GitHub

May 13, 2015 | 1 min read

We’re excited to announce a much-requested feature: Burndown Charts displayed in GitHub’s UI.

Burndown Charts are not confined to any one development methodology, but are most often associated with Scrum – a software development framework involving frequent releases, incremental progress, and a focus on customer requirements.

As an early indicator of how projects are progressing, Burndown Charts can help teams meet deadlines and track their velocity. Because they visually display complete and incomplete work, they’re also a user-friendly reporting tool – the quickest answer to the question, “How’s that project going?”

Getting started with Burndown Charts

Burndown Charts are meant to track velocity during short sprints of work. Accordingly, each GitHub Milestone has its own Burndown Chart. Click the burndown icon to view Burndown Charts for any repo, then filter between Milestones using the drop-down on the right.

To ‘build’ your chart’s x-axis, choose the Milestone’s start and end dates (found near the top of the chart.)

Time Estimation

Burndown Charts display your project’s completed work in relation to its estimated timeline, represented by a diagonal line. To develop this diagonal line, you’ll estimate the complexity of each task (GitHub issue) in the project. Although some teams estimate complexity by hour or day, many prefer "story points" – a unitless scale which can lead to more accurate estimations.

Assign the complexity of each GitHub issue using the ‘Estimate’ button.

Estimation with story points for GitHub issues

Like every ZenHub feature, Burndown Charts integrate with GitHub activity. Each time your team closes an issue, a new data point is added to the chart. When your team’s completed work tracks closely to the diagonal estimated timeline, you can be confident you’ll achieve your deadlines!