Burndown chart is overreporting work left

Jason Fedelem

We've traditionally been a Kanban shop, and for a number of reasons are switching over to using Sprints now.  I've created a dashboard showing our sprint burndowns, among other things.  We've reached the end of Sprint 1, and the burndown chart shows over 30 SP remaining, but the board and filter, which are accurate, show 16:

 

I've had to redact some info, but there are 23 cards in the Sprint.  All but 4 are done, which are the 4 shown in the bottom, mostly redacted, portion of the screenshot.

However, if you look at the "Remaining" line on the above chart, its showing about double that.

All of the other cards are in "green" statuses, meaning they are counted as "Done".

 

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

So your red line looks rather dysfunctional, and I think that might be feeding into your counting problems.

 For the first half-ish of the sprint, nothing happens, then suddenly, you get a hefty burn down.  That is absolutely fine and very very common.  Whilst the guideline says "we should be completing X points per day", in reality your developers are going to pick up a handful of tasks at the beginning of the sprint and not complete them on the first day.  It is perfectly normal to see a flat line for the first couple of days, while people are working on, but not completing, stories.

The bit that looks broken to me is the up-ticks.  A burndown should be a set of downward steps.  If the line goes up, that means you are either increasing the estimates on issues in the sprint, or adding more into the sprint.  Both of those represent scope-creep and you should not be doing them.  The burndown screams to me that you had some incident on the 27th and drew "fix incident" into the developers list of stuff to do.  Not great, but a perfectly valid thing to do, and explain in your sprint review.  I'm more worried about the little upward jags - they should not be happening at all.

Anyway, there are two things to look at to try to explain your burndown.  First is the scope creep I've talked about above, but the other one is far more simple to investigate - have you put sprint estimates on any sub-tasks?