Imagine staring at the below chart that summarizes your largest release ever. The remaining estimate is on a clear collision course with your red line — your resource model — while the blue line reveals your team hasn’t had enough bandwidth to make meaningful progress. You’re at a crossroads. Should you have acted sooner? Will momentum shift in time to recover? What will happen to the business if this release slips?
It’s in moments like this that leaders turn to their teams and ask the toughest question in software delivery: Are we going to make it?
Depending on who you ask, the answers range from guarded pessimism to unshakable optimism. But who’s right — and how soon will you know? And when we do know, will there be any levers left to deliver what the business needs to be successful?
💡 Lean hard into a Highly Transparent, Data Driven Approach
Most burndown charts are built for sprints — two-week snapshots that tell you how the current work is going. Most businesses can’t afford the luxury of just building features and shipping them when they’re ready. Instead, there needs to be a rational business case with real ROI for the project; otherwise it doesn’t make financial sense to do it. Before making large investments, every business needs to answer questions like:
- When will this release ship or when will the set of features necessary to realize our expected value be done?
- Will we be able to deliver all the features that customers need?
- Do we have the capacity to hit our deadline?
- What happens if scope changes mid-cycle?
- Are all our teams on track to deliver at roughly the same time?
- If there’s a problem with our schedule, when will we know about it?
The Red Line Burndown isn’t just a sprint tool — it’s designed to scale transparency and visibility across entire releases, epics, or projects. For product leaders, software managers, and Scrum Masters, it provides a critical planning and forecasting layer that lives above the sprint, which allows teams and leaders to make critical decisions to successfully steer the business.
🔍 What Makes the Red Line Burndown Ideal for Releases?
- Projection Based on Resource Modeling
The Red Line shows where the team is headed, based on actual velocity along with a resource guideline – a red line – that clearly shows how the project is performing against your resource assumptions. This means you’re not just tracking how much is left, but when you’re on pace to finish. - Budget Line = Reality Check
Especially in long releases, it’s easy to commit to more work than your team can realistically deliver. The budget line acts as a sanity check — a flat visual that shows whether the remaining work is outpacing capacity. Teams should use past releases & performance to determine their capacity and ultimately set the value of this line. - Change Log Visibility Over Time
In any multi-sprint initiative, scope changes and tracking down sharp increases or decreases in scope can be extremely time consuming. The Red Line Burndown shows a changes directly below the chart (Analyze Burndown Changes feature), so you can answer these questions quickly:- When did the work increase?
- Who added it?
- Did we cut anything?
- Did the added work impact our delivery date?
Additionally you can sort and filter the changes by zooming on the chart or clicking on the headers.
🎯 Critical Decision Points in Long-Term Releases
1. 📆 Release Forecasting
You can see not just how many story points or time is left, but when you’re likely to finish. This lets you:
- Set realistic release dates
- Detect slippage months in advance
- Communicate expectations clearly to stakeholders
Leaders should revisit the forecast regularly. If the Red Line is drifting past the target date, it’s time to revisit scope, staffing, or both. We recommend that 1st line managers look at these charts weekly and 2nd/3rd level managers look at them every 2 weeks.
2. 📈 Velocity Trends Across Sprints
Is the team speeding up or slowing down? Are holidays, attrition, or tech debt affecting delivery?
The Red Line responds to real data, not theoretical averages. You’ll know if:
- The team’s velocity needs to be revisited
- Burned down work isn’t translating into value (e.g., rework, bugs)
- There’s a pattern of under- or over-committing
The Additional Burndown feature lets you add burndowns for subsets of the overall chart to see how any JQL queryable set of issues are evolving over time. Imagine being able to:
- simultaneously see how high priority work is being completed compared to low or medium priority work
- observing how one team’s backlog or velocity compares to another
- Understanding the composition of the remaining work – how much of the work is bugs vs. features?
- Comparing the progress and effort on different features or
3. ✂️ Scope Creep and Replanning
Over long releases, the backlog inevitably changes. The built-in change log shows:
- When work was added
- How much it changed the trajectory
- Whether your ship date moved
This is the single most overlooked factor in failed delivery estimates — and now, it’s visible.
4. 🧠 Scenario Planning
Before the release begins (or mid-cycle), you can simulate different trajectories:
- What if we cut scope?
- Use the Additional Burndowns feature to add queries representing different sets of scope
- What if we get two more developers for the last month?
- Copy the burndown gadget, and quickly update the resource model to understand how this might affect the project schedule.
- What happens if our velocity drops 15%?
The chart answers these “what if” questions with data, not guesses.
👥 How Leadership Roles Use the Chart
For Product and Engineering Leaders:
- Portfolio visibility: Align multiple teams’ burndowns to a common release date.
- Prioritization: Use drift in the Red Line to support decisions on what’s in vs. out.
- Stakeholder communication: Bring transparency to dates and risks.
- Lever Horizon: Longer lead time to levers like scope, resources, quality and time lines
For Scrum Masters:
- Trend coaching: Point out velocity consistency (or instability).
- Impediment detection: Use slowdowns to surface blockers early.
- Sprint planning guardrails: Ensure capacity aligns with long-term burn trajectory.
- Lever Horizon: Shorter lead time to levers like velocity, design, quality and time lines
For Software Managers:
- Capacity conversations: Make the case for headcount or timeline shifts using real throughput trends.
- Resource balancing: Shift team focus or redistribute work as needed to hit release goals.
- Technical debt surfacing: If throughput is low despite stable scope, investigate build quality and architecture.
- Lever Horizon: Short/medium lead time to levers like team composition, velocity, design approach, scope and quality
🛠️ Best Practices for Long-Term Use
- Track releases, not just sprints: Set up your burndown using filters that encompass full initiatives or epics.
- Use real velocity, not optimistic targets: Let the chart adjust organically, and update assumptions as the team grows.
- Review every sprint: Even in long releases, assess the chart weekly or biweekly to adapt faster.
- Communicate in visuals: The chart speaks across roles — use it in leadership reviews, demos, and planning sessions.
Final Thought
Agile isn’t just about speed — it’s about adaptability. The Red Line Burndown gives teams and leaders a shared map of where things are headed, not just where they’ve been. In long-term releases, it becomes your early warning system, your sanity check, and your negotiation tool — all in one. It allows each layer of leadership to act on the appropriate time horizon for the levers at their disposal.
If your team is aiming for a major milestone in the next quarter or beyond, don’t rely on memory, intuition, or spreadsheets. Let the Red Line Burndown tell you the truth — and have the confidence and clarity to act decisively on what it reveals.