What is the difference in Sprint Report and Burndown Chart

Harvinder Singh

Although I understand the defination which says:

1. Burndown Chart: Use a Burndown Chart to track the total work remaining, and to project the likelihood of achieving the sprint goal. By tracking the remaining work throughout the iteration,
2. Sprint Report: Understand the work completed or pushed back to the backlog in each sprint. This helps you determine if your team is overcommitting or if there is excessive scope creep.

But if you see the graph, more or less they represent the same.

Walter Buggenhout

The burndown chart has more of a focus on day-to-day activities. Below the chart, you will see a an overview of updates on issues. When an issue is added to a sprint, a status change occurs or work has been logged. All these events are entries that are logged and displayed below the chart when they occur.

The sprint report shows you a list of issues and groups them into completed / not completed / removed from sprint (and shows an asterisk to mark issues added after the sprint start.

In short, the burndown chart and the change history that comes with it aims to give you detailed and almost real time insights into how your sprint is progressing. The sprint report is better suited for snapshot like intermediate checks (it has less information, but is easier to read) and retrospectives. Which is why the sprint report can also be linked to a retrospective page in Confluence.