The Problem We Aimed to Solve…
Traditional Jira burndown charts, while useful, often fall short in providing the insights that project managers and teams need to make informed decisions. We repeatedly encountered several challenges:
- Scope Changes: Standard burndowns don’t effectively track or visualize how project scope changes over time
- Resource Planning: Traditional charts fail to account for varying team capacity and velocity. They also fail to explain how your resource model assumptions are playing out with your real project data.
- Multiple Perspectives: Teams needed to track different subsets of work (like features vs bugs) within the same project. We would often see changes in the burndown chart and couldn’t easily explain what was happening. This would occur as testing efforts would increase, which would naturally lead to increases in logged bugs and ultimately backlog growth.
- Prediction Accuracy: Existing tools didn’t provide reliable project completion forecasts and teams often would rationalize that they were “2 weeks from being done.”
Our Solution
The Redline Burndown Gadget addresses these challenges with several innovative features:
The Red Line (Resource Model)
We introduced the concept of “The Red Line” – a sophisticated resource model that accounts for:
- Team size changes over time including the evaluation of what happens if you add resources to the team starting at a certain point in the project
- Variable velocity/utilization rates
- This gives teams a realistic baseline to measure against, rather than just a straight line from start to finish.
- It also provides for guidelines in terms of the inherent inaccuracies of trying to model resources exactly.
Multiple Burndown Tracking
Teams can now track up to 5 additional burndowns within the same chart, enabling them to:
- Compare progress across different teams
- Monitor specific issue types separately
- Track high-priority work alongside regular development
- Understand how the natural inflow of bugs is affecting feature development.
- Analyze how different components contribute to overall progress
Estimate Accuracy Tracking
The yellow “Estimate Accuracy” line provides unprecedented visibility into scope changes, helping teams:
- Identify when and where scope creep occurs
- Understand the impact of discovered work
- Improve future estimation accuracy
Flexible Implementation
We support both story point and time-based tracking, accommodating different team methodologies and preferences. The gadget integrates seamlessly with Jira’s existing fields and workflows.
Real-World Impact
The Redline Burndown Gadget transformed how teams we’ve worked with track and manage their projects:
- Leaders and Project managers can make data-driven decisions about resource allocation
- Teams get early warning signs when projects are going off track
- Stakeholders have clearer visibility into project progress and challenges
- Organizations can improve their estimation and planning processes
Looking Forward
We’re committed to continuing development based on user feedback. Please share your ideas for future enhancements by emailing us at feedback@crimsalytics.com.
The Redline Burndown Gadget represents our vision for modern project tracking – one that combines sophisticated analysis with practical, actionable insights.