Fixing the ToDo issue in Burndown chart

One of the most common mistakes a normalizing scrum team would do is – to neglect reducing the Todo.

It is important that the team would reduce Todo as they make progress in a sprint. This enables scrum master and product owner (and hence stake holders) to understand if the sprint is making progress or not.

We can monitor progress – status, using a burn down chart. Burndown should grow downwards (in a 45 degree slide) along with ideal line when team makes the estimated progress. It will start grow in a straight line, parallel to X coordinate (Time) when team misses to make progress. Sometimes, some delivering / progressing team also get flat line burndown as they miss to reduce ‘ToDo’.

So, it is an important task to a Scrum master (as an owner of monitoring role) to give feedback to team on this. But how to identify the tasks (or stories) where ToDo is not entered? Here is how:

Get the backlog (Of course, sprint backlog), and check for the following.

• Identify all the stories that are done, but still having ToDo remaining.
• Identify all the stories whose tasks are completed but the ToDo is not reset to zero.
• Most importantly, find all the stories where the ToDo and the estimated hours are same but the Done hours are entered.

Give this list of Taks, stories to your team asking to check if they can reset or reduce the ToDo, which will immediately reflect in better Burndown and hence will be projected as a delivering team.