Burndown Chart not representing progress

[Steven_Choiniere]

My team has set up a board with multiple sprints, all of our Burndown Charts do not seem to represent our progress, as it is usually a vertical or horizontal red line. We are using Time Remaining Estimate, all our issues have proper time logged. Any help on how to fix this issue?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

have you verified that your board is configured as follows?

and if you look at one of your issues that appear on the board you have verified time logging (time spent and time remaining)?

[Steven_Choiniere]

Thanks for the reply! Yes and yes! 

[Jack Brickey]

that is quite odd TBH. It is really hard for me to debug this w/o seeing it first hand and poking around. Either there is a bug or you are overlooking something obvious here. At the risk of asking obvious questions...

• you are looking at the burndown that is associated w/ the active sprint?
• the issues where the time is being logged is showing on the active sprint board?
• you mention "multiple sprints" do you mean you are running parallel sprints?
• did the time logging occur after the sprint start date?
• are any issues w/ time logged in the done category? just curious...
• do you have any addons that might be conflicting here?
• has this been a recent issue or has it never worked?

last resort - https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/ 

[Steven_Choiniere]

Hi Jack, 

Thank you so much for your help! 

• Yes, that view is of an active sprint. 
• Yes
• All 3 are done, the last 4th is still active
• Believe time was logged before sprint started, all time has to be logged before spring starts, correct?
• Yes issues with time logged are in the "Done" category
• Dont believe so
• We created a Test Board, as to not disturb tickets on our main Project board. Is there a way to run a sprint board within a project that won't affect other Kanban boards?

All help is much appreciated!

Thank you ,

[Jack Brickey]

What I meant in asking about when the time spent is logged is to ensure it is done after the sprint starts. The Original estimate must be logged prior to start but time spent after the start so that it shows as burndown. 

[Grigory Salnikov]

Hello @Steven_Choiniere !

Please, take a look at the similar question and the discussion below:

Burn Down Chart Not Showing Progress

It may give you some thoughts.

[Jack Brickey]

note that estimation by SP behaves differently than time estimation.

[Grigory Salnikov]

Yes, I've already noted it (after I answered).

Thanks you.

[msp]

Is Sprint Burndown which is the basis for the scrum team to manage their progress through the sprints still an issue in JIRA in 2022?  How is this tool even good for Agile Software Development?  We have had to resort to using excel just to keep things sane for us in 2018-2019.  There is no way to keep the Sprint Burndown on the boards either.  There are much better tools that give you all the agile software development artifacts without having to dig for them.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @msp ,

this post has a bit of age on it. Are you having a specific issue with your burn down report?

[msp]

Well it turns out that I did some reading on how Jira defines a burn down chart - insisting on marking only "Done" stories (not even tasks) with SP/Time estimates for burn down which to me is completely unhelpful as the team needs to know how they are progressing through the sprint. 

Here is a link (https://refinem.com/essential-agile-processes-part-6-sprint-burndown-chart/) explaining just that and what I am looking for and how folks actually make use of the burn down chart.  I would like Atlassian to seriously reconsider their stance on what a burn down is or at least provide us the flexibility.  

Here is an example from my own work outside of Jira.  As you can see below folks overestimated on tasks on things they started early on and later on found items that they had not allocated enough time.  This helps in knowing which type of tasks they need to estimate better.  Having one jagged stepped lined burndown is completely unhelpful especially one that does not even record daily work without being marked done or even a trend line.

Please let me know if there is a way to do this through reporting and or custom graphs to achieve the same.  There are quite a few folks asking for this.  Thanks.