📈 Jira burnup chart: why Agile teams upgrade to track scope and progress across any workflow

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A burnup chart tracks two things simultaneously: how much work your team has completed and how the total scope has evolved. Unlike a burndown chart, which only shows remaining work, a burnup makes scope changes visible the moment they occur.

Jira's native burnup chart covers the basics, displaying Work Scope, Scope Projection, Completed Work, and an ideal progress Guideline for a single sprint. Useful, but limited.

The gap? There's no velocity-based forecasting, no cross-board aggregation, and no support for Kanban burnup views. Teams managing multi-sprint delivery or reporting to stakeholders quickly hit a ceiling and revert to manual spreadsheets.

What's missing from Jira's built-in tools

The core limitation is flexibility. Out of the box, Jira can't:

• 🚫 Aggregate data across multiple boards or teams

• 🚫 Forecast completion based on historical velocity

• 🚫 Model delivery scenarios or simulate scope growth

• 🚫 Switch estimation units between story points, issue count, or time

• 🚫 Support Kanban burnup views in any native form

For anyone managing delivery timelines, coordinating across teams, or presenting to stakeholders, a single-sprint snapshot isn't enough.

How the Agile Burnup Burndown Charts app addresses this

Agile Burnup Burndown Charts by Broken Build is a Jira dashboard gadget built specifically to close these gaps. What sets it apart is its support for multiple data sources: Scrum boards, Kanban boards, projects, releases, epics, initiatives, and custom JQL queries. It adapts to how your team actually works, rather than forcing a single framework.

The chart plots completed work against the total scope over time. At a glance, you can see story points delivered, the percentage of scope complete, and how much work remains - all configurable by time range, estimation field, and data source.

Key features of the Jira Burnup chart by Broken Build

📊 Velocity-based forecasting

The chart automatically generates three forecast projections from your team's historical velocity data:

• 🟦 Max - Delivery at the highest recorded pace

• 🟧 Average - Mean velocity across the configured period

• 🟥 Min - Most conservative projection based on the slowest pace

Each scenario displays an estimated completion date and the number of sprints or intervals remaining, giving stakeholders a defensible range rather than a single optimistic estimate.

Beyond defaults, you can build custom scenarios using a target velocity, a fixed deadline, a velocity percentile, or a Monte Carlo simulation. This lets you model specific planning questions, such as "What if we deliver 20% faster?" or "Can we realistically hit this release date?"

🔧 Scope modelling and estimation flexibility

• Switch estimation units freely - story points, issue count, time-based, or any custom numeric field
• Set a default estimate for unestimated issues so calculations stay consistent
• Configure custom Done statuses to better match how your team works
• Adjust remaining work values manually to reflect mid-cycle changes (Auto, What-if, Epic estimate)

• Simulate scope growth to account for expected backlog additions

🗂️ Multi-board and cross-team support

Select multiple Scrum or Kanban boards to aggregate delivery data across teams. Sprint name filters, issue type filters, and JQL-based scoping let you shape the chart to reflect exactly the work you're tracking - from one team's sprint to an entire PI.

🔍 Issue-level drill-down

Click on any data point to see exactly which issues contribute to the count at that moment. No guesswork, no context-switching.

See it in action

Explore interactive demos showing how the burnup chart behaves across different data sources - click through intervals, test scenarios, and drill into issue-level data:

• 👉 Scrum burnup chart example

• 👉 Kanban burnup chart example

• 👉 Cross-team burnup chart example

• 👉 Release burnup chart example

• 👉 Epic burnup chart example

• 👉 Initiative burnup chart example

Ready to try it? If your team has hit the ceiling of Jira's native burnup report, the Agile Burnup Burndown Charts app is available now on the Atlassian Marketplace - free to install and try.

Need broader reporting capabilities?

If your teams also require velocity trends, cycle time analysis, cumulative flow diagrams, or Monte Carlo simulations, the Agile Reports & Gadgets bundle includes all charting apps - including burnup and burndown charts - under a single licence.

The outcome: planning conversations grounded in real data

With a properly configured Jira burnup chart using the Agile Burnup Burndown Charts app by Broken Build, teams stop guessing and start planning from evidence:

• ✅ Scope changes are visible the moment they happen

• ✅ Forecasts are grounded in actual velocity - not optimism

• ✅ Stakeholders get transparent, range-based timelines

• ✅ Both Scrum and Kanban teams are fully supported

Pro tip: Use the multi-scenario forecast view in your sprint review or release planning sessions. Showing stakeholders best-, average-, and worst-case projections builds far more trust than committing to a single date.

📖 Full documentation: Burnup chart

💬 Contact Broken Build support for setup help, best-practice guidance, or advanced use cases

Support options:

• 📧 Email: support@brokenbuild.net

• 🔗 Customer Portal

• 📅 Book a demo

Happy reporting,
The Broken Build Team