Why is my burndown chart not working properly?

Question

Hello Everyone,

I am evaluating JIRA Agile and I am trying to understand how day-to-day activities are managed in my sprint.  I currently have an active sprint containing stories with sub-tasks.  I am estimating and tracking at a sub-task level which are then rolled up to the story.  After logging work for a few days my burndown chart doesn't resemble anything useful:

burndown.pngWhat does this information tell you and are there any improvement tips?  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you and best regards,

Andrew

burndown.png

Andrew76 · Answer

Hello Marc,
Thank you for taking the time to answer!  I will take your order of operations into consideration and see whether this provides expected results.
Best regards,
Andrew

M_gqiaol · Answer

What is the start and end date of your sprint? If you start your sprint before any issues are in it or before there are any estimates the starting estimate will be 0hrs and throw the chart off.

You should change the start date to a time after the work is estimated and issues are in the sprint. This is so you have a baseline scope to go off of. You may add issues after the start date but that will make the red line jump as you're increasing the scope after it was already decided upon.

You also might want to check the board configuration's Estimation and make sure the Estimation Statistic is set to the correct field you're using for tracking time.

The order of operation should be:

* Create the sprint
* Add issues to the sprint (with estimates)
* Start the sprint

Hope this helps.