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!
