Sprint Burndown chart does not reflect correct values.

[AmitChabra]

Fellows, 
 
I am managing multiple projects in Jira, But I have never been able to generate Burndown chart from Jira successfully. 
My projects set-up > Classic Scrum 
Backlog structure > Versions > EPics > Story Cards / Tasks > Subtasks 
Hours assignment > Sub Tasks has hours, and Story Cards has Points (Where 1 point = 9 hours). Hours are assigned under the field "Original Hours."  
Sprint Duration > 3 Months ( We have a proprietary methodology, where Sprint is called an iteration. We are in 2nd iteration. 
 
How is burndown chart generated > burn down chart is generated using "remaining hours at x-axis", "project duration at Y-axis". 
 
But burndown is getting generated only for cards in-progress. Cards in "Todo" state are not picked up for remaining hours. 
 
Needed > I want to generate burndown chart using Original hours at X-axis and Duration on Y-axis. But this is not generating anything, Redline that represents remaining hours is at zero and Green Line is not appearing at all. 
 
Please help me with this problem. I have been struggling to resolve this problem for the last three months, and I am not able to generate burndown reports. Which makes our management think Jira is a useless tool and they are wasting money on it. 
 
Best 
Amit C

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_]

A burndown is measuring what you committed to in the sprint against what you achieved.  It doesn't matter exactly what the measure is as long as it is a number (length of time, story points, business value etc). 

You burn down on one single value.  Most Jira installs use Story Points for burndown (but a lot also log hours spent on stories and sub-tasks - remember SPs are not time based).  You need to make a concrete decision what you want to burn down on and make sure everyone using that board knows which it is.

When you commit to doing things in a sprint, you are telling your product owner "we think we can do X amount of work, and you've got these items at the top of your list, so we'll do the count that add up to an amount inside X".  Sub-tasks in this context are irrelevant, your product owner does not care about how the developers might break up a story.  If you want to burn down on hours, you need to use "original estimate" and put the estimates on the story level, not sub-tasks.  (Your product owner has a simple view of a story - is it done?  The sub-tasks are useless to them, it's either "not done" or "done", so they don't care if you've done 99 sub-tasks of 100 or just 3 - it only counts when you've done 100%)

Your velocity and burn down can only look at issues that are included in a board, so if you're missing "to do" in the calculations, I would guess you have not mapped that into the board columns.

Finally, burn down happens when an item is "done".  Jira Software measures this as "being in the last column on the board" (i.e. the issue is in one of the status in the "done" column).