How to create a Sprint Burdown Chart in Jira with subtasks

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In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Sprint Burndown (or Burnup) chart that includes subtasks using Great Gadgets app for Jira or Confluence. No more Excel exports, no manual tracking – just a clear, real-time view of your sprint progress with subtasks included.

The Problem: Why Jira’s Native Sprint Burndown Chart is Insufficient

For teams that break work into subtasks and estimate them, Jira’s built-in sprint burndown chart often lacks the detail needed for accurate, day-to-day tracking.

The core issue? Jira’s default burndown chart and gadget ignore subtasks entirely — so the chart only reflects progress when parent stories are completed.

If you’ve ever sat in a sprint review wondering why the burndown line barely moved — despite dozens of subtasks being completed — you’re definitely not alone.

The solution: Great Gadgets for Jira or Confluence

Luckily, there’s a better way to track and visualize sprint progress in real time within Jira—without resorting to Excel or manual work.

Great Gadgets app offers a Sprint Burndown Burnup Chart gadget that gives you accurate, real-time insights into your sprint progress.

Because we know every team operates differently, we build each gadget to be highly configurable. With the Sprint Burndown Burnup Chart gadget you can:

• Include subtasks along with their parent items, or track only the subtasks;
• Use different estimation methods to reflect your team’s unique workflow;
• Visualize sprint progress clearly and reliably, in real-time;
• Configure it as a burnup chart (which Jira doesn’t offer natively).

💡Bonus Feature - A complete Sprint Report with Subtasks! The gadget can also display a detailed sprint report with subtasks included, which you can easily export it to CSV for analysis or sharing.

Why It Matters

With subtasks included, your burndown chart becomes a true reflection of sprint progress. Teams get better visibility, Scrum Masters run smoother retrospectives, and no one wastes time explaining why charts look “stuck.”

Do other app gadgets offer support for subtasks?

Yes! Great Gadgets offers many other gadgets that can include the subtasks in their calculations:

• Team Velocity gadget
• Release Burndown Burnup Chart gadget
• Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) gadget
• Control Chart gadget and more.

You now have all the tools required to build a powerful and insightful dashboard — with full support for subtasks.

👉 Try Great Gadgets free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself!

[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings, community!

For those wanting to measure based upon their breakdown to sub-task levels, perhaps consider learning more about the history of burn charts, and how that compares to what your team wants to learn from measurement...

A long, long time ago (in agile years), teams sometimes used two charts: the burndown and the burnup:

• the burndown showed any effort measurements, such as in working hours, and included all child work items such as sub-tasks
• the burnup showed individually releasable work items as they completed, often measuring as a cumulative count of items or some value-proxy (e.g., story points, forecasted earnings dollar value, etc.); this chart did not include sub-tasks as they were not usually individually releasable.  (Aside: in Jira, sub-task types are part of their parent item, and I suspect were not intended / considered individually releasable work items with value for a team's customers.)

When these two charts were placed side-by-side (with the burndown on the left side), the team might get a better feeling for what was happening.  That is, when effort was spent consistently and value was delivered consistently per the iteration plan, the combined, actual trend lines' shape looked like a "V" when everything was going well. 

This was called the "Agile-V", and it could indicate process anti-patterns earlier, such as burning down effort but not delivering any value on track with the iteration timeframe.

All that to say, when deciding to measure sub-tasks, please consider what those sub-task represent as work items relative to the value delivered to your customers.  Adding measures for value-delivery may help if it is not already happening.

Kind regards,
Bill