Question About Burning Down Story Points and Tracking Sprint Velocity

Question

Hello!

I recently started a new position as a Scrum Master for a new organization. I am inheriting a Jira instance where no one on the team had much experience administering Jira before my arrival.

One of the first configurations I made was adding a workflow automation to burndown Story Points at a specific point in the workflow. This automation occurs on the 3rd to final step of the workflow (the Tech Lead communicated to me that that's the status where we want to show the burndown action).

It was then communicated to me that, when looking at completed Issues on the Sprint Board, that the team does not like to have the Story Points showing 0 on the tickets, because they like to get a high level understanding of the original Story Points of completed Issues in order to understand the level of effort of work put in.

My initial thinking was that not burning down Story Points would mean that I would not be logging Sprint velocity numbers, and would have no burndown chart to reference. After some testing I found that when Issues arrive in the FINAL "Completed" status of the workflow that the "burndown" action does occur, even when the Story Points aren't actually burned down to 0. The "burndown" action is captured in the Sprint burndown report when a ticket arrives to the final "Completed" workflow status.

First reaction is that this is news to me, that ticket Story Points get marked as "burned down" when they are completed in the workflow (and not actually burned down to 0). However, does anyone know how I could have this "burndown" action occur on the 3rd to last step of the workflow?

Drew G_8nz660 · Answer

Hey Matt -

THANK YOU very much for this info! I since tested everything you mentioned in a test environment, and the Velocity Chart reporting looks excellent.

I was not aware of the details you mentioned such as the importance of the "Done" tickets being in the furthest right-side column of the Scrum Board, as well as it being bad practice to manually burn down Story Points. These methods are how I have learned to handle Sprints while on the job, so clearly I need to take a lesson in Jira administration.

Anyway, thanks again for your help here. It really has made a difference on my end.

Matt Parks · Answer

@Drew G

If you want your Velocity Chart to accurately represent the amount of completed work, don't ever change the Story Point value.

The way that the Velocity Chart works, as far as the Completed value is concerned, is that it adds up the estimate value (in your case, Story Points) of all of the work items in the far-right column.

So, if you want anything that has a status of Ready for QA Deployment to be included in the Completed portion of the Velocity Chart, that status has to be mapped to the far-right column of the board.

Note that you can have multiple statuses mapped to a single column, so you could have Ready for QA Deployment and Complete both mapped to the 'Done' column, which means that any work items in either of those statuses would have their Story Point totals added to the Completed total in the Velocity Chart.

That being said, unless I am mis-understanding your workflow, it would feel weird that it could be considered Complete while in the Ready for QA Deployment status but then later be considered incomplete when it moves forward in the workflow (to either Ready for QA, QA Testing, or Failed). But that's not directly related to this particular discussion.

Drew G_8nz660 · Answer

Hi Matt -

Hope you've been doing great. Circling back to this because I am having the same issues about not being able to properly track the numbers in the Velocity Report (manager is starting to get on me about it).

Screenshot here shows what my Kanban board looks like. I have 2 automation rules set in place when an Issue lands on the "Ready for QA Deployment" status in the "Awaiting QA Deployment" column.

1. Story Points get burned down to 0

2. Resolution changes to "Done."

Burning Story Points to 0 does help with the Burndown Chart report (red line on the graph goes downward when points are burned down to 0), however, the Velocity Report is still empty.

If I am understanding you correctly, you suggest that I do not have the points automatically burndown when an Issue lands in the "Awaiting QA Deployment" column, and to leave the points as is?

Furthermore, it sounds like I must somehow rework my workflow so that the "Awaiting QA Deployment" column is the furthest right column on the Kanban Board in order to get that correct Velocity Reporting.

Does this all sounds correct? Really appreciate your help here.