Burn Down Art

About burn down charts

We're using various levels of agile/scrum methodologies on various projects and one commonly used tool related part of that process that I particularly enjoy is the burn down chart. It took me a long time to see the value in these charts, but I'm starting to come around to see that they can be helpful as a way to gauge the progress on a project. The chart shows time on the horizontal axis and tasks remaining on the vertical axis. You start with a straight line from the start point to completion and then update the chart to show where you really are.

Is there a burn down chart library?

One day on our morning scrum call as we analyzed some charts, Todd Nienkerk (who I work with on the Economist project) pondered the shape of our graphs and wondered whether or not there was a library of known shapes of charts so that we could gain some insight into what our charts mean.

It turns out, there is no such library.

burndownart.com

So, as a funtime project I built a quick site called burn down art which is based on the idea that when you get a bunch of burn down charts together and use some imagecache actions on them you end up with something that looks like art....

The site is a basic taxonomy+cck+imagefield+imagecach+views site. One neat bonus feature that I find somewhat fun is that it uses the Twitter module and a little custom code to re-tweet everything to the burn down art twitter account.

Community site - add your chart!

I hope you like it and will post your burn down charts to the page. No registration is required. The more that are added the more likely we are to have good information about what shapes of charts we tend to commonly see...