Release burndown report data issue

[Stanisław Juźwicki]

Hi all,

I seem to be having an issue with the release burndown report (or I do not understand how to use it properly, in either case help would be appreciated).

I have a customer requirement to be able to track scope creep through sprints. We have a baseline estimate for the whole project at the very beginning and this will obviously go up and down throughout the project. So here I am thinking "yay, release burndown is my man" (my project is represented as an appropriate fix version / release obviously).

So here is what I did (I assume the order is important):

1. I have created all the relevant issues in JIRA and assigned them to appropriate sprints (none of the sprints being active yet). I have also set the story points on all the issues. The total story points for the project equals 3216 (important figure, this is my baseline and my contractual benchmark with the customer).

2. The first sprint (let's call it "Sprint 1" has two issues, representing 48 story points according to the baseline.

3. At the beginning of the week I have started Sprint 1 and set the sprint duration from Monday (07.10.2019) 8:00 AM to Friday (11.10.2019) 4:00 PM.

4. Today (11.10.2019) at 8:00 AM (so within the sprint time). I have changed the story points on the Spritn 1 issues, because they were done already and they took somewhat less time to do. Specifically I have changed the Story points from 48 to 35.5 (12.5 SP decrease).

5. Also today (11.10.2019) at 9:00 AM I have completed Sprint 1 (changing the end time to 9:00 AM to represent reality) and started Sprint 2.

...aaaaand then I checked the release burndown report.

What I expected to see:

• 3216 story points in the "Original estimate at start of version" column

• 3216 story points in the "Sprint 1" column, consisting of:

• a) 3168 SP remaining
• b) 35.5 SP completed in sprint
• c) 12.5 SP scope change (negative, scope decrease)

What I got is:

• 3203.5 story points in the "Original estimate at start of version" column (so the baseline of 3216 already decreased by 12.5 SP)
• 3203.5 story points in the "Sprint 1" column, consisting of:
• a) 3168 SP remaining
• b) 35.5 SP completed

So basically JIRA assumed that the scope change happened before the sprint (still on the baseline level) which is not true. The result is that now my baseline is wrong and it doesn't accurately show the scope change.

Can anyone advise whether I am doing something wrong here?