Burn Up Charts

Overview

Burn up charts are a classic way to track program, project or team progress against a known scope of tasks.

Creating the Report

Issue Count Burn Up Chart

For a burn up of issues, select the Issue Value Snapshots by Date Report.

For report configuration options, set up your report as follows:

Option	Selection	Comments
Time Period	any	Select your dates of interest using relative dates ("Last 3 Months", "This Year") or a custom Start Date and End Date.
Search	any	Select your JIRA projects, project categories and filters of interest. Or click on the JQL tab in that field to enter a command using JIRA Query Language (JQL).
Statuses to Include	all	Select which JIRA issue statuses you wish to include in the report. A couple good options for a burn up chart: select all statuses in your JIRA instance for a complete picture of scope, scope changes and completed issues select "Resolved" and/or "Closed" to show only the issues completed
Value Of	Status (Historical)	We're reporting on the historical status of each issue as it was set during each individual reporting interval.
Chart Type		Select the Column Chart.

Now click on the Run Report button to create your report.  

If you included multiple statuses to get a complete picture of scope, scope changes and completed issues, you'll see something like this:

If you included only Closed issues, you'll see a simple burn up of completed issues:

Story Points Burn Up Chart

For a burn up of story points, use instead the Issue Values Snapshots Sum by Date Report.

For report configuration options, set up your report as follows:

Option	Selection	Comments
Time Period	any	Select your dates of interest using relative dates ("Last 3 Months", "This Year") or a custom Start Date and End Date.
Search	any	Select your JIRA projects, project categories and filters of interest. Or click on the JQL tab in that field to enter a command using JIRA Query Language (JQL).
Segment By	Status (Historical)	We're breaking down the results by the historical status of each issue as it was set during each individual reporting interval.
Statuses to Include	all	Select which JIRA issue statuses you wish to include in the report. A couple good options for a burn up chart: select all statuses in your JIRA instance for a complete picture of scope, scope changes and completed issues select "Resolved" and/or "Closed" to show only the issues completed
Issue Field	Story Points
Chart Type		Select the Column Chart.

Now click on the Run Report button to create your report.

Segmenting Results

The Segment By field in Dataplane reports allows you to break down report results by any number of different JIRA fields or properties in order to see more granularity.

For example, when looking at a burn up of issues across a program of multiple projects, select "Project" for Segment By to see each project's contribution to the results.  Or select "Issue Type" or "Assignee" or any combination of the above for even more detailed analysis.

In the following report, we've segmented the results by both Project and Issue Type:

Reporting Based on Sprints

You can hone in on just those issues that were within specific sprints during the selected time period with some JQL.  

For the Search field on the report configuration page, click on the "JQL" tab and enter a custom query like:

project in ("Project A", "Project B") and sprint in (39, 40, 41, 42, 43)

Customizing Chart Colors

To better focus our report on the data of greatest interest, use a Dataplane Customizer Script to choose custom colors for your chart.  

To access the Customizer Script field, go to the report configuration tab in your report and click on the More Options link.

Then copy and paste the following script into the Customizer Script field as a starting point. Add additional lines or modify this script based on the specific Status options in your JIRA instance.

customizeChart {
    series ANY color "gainsboro"
    series "Closed" color "navy"
}

Here's what our burn up chart now looks like with customized colors:

Ordering Chart Series

You'll notice that the Closed issues in the above chart occupy the middle range of the chart. Not ideal for a burn up chart. This is because our series are being ordered automatically based on JIRA's natural ordering for issue statuses.  

To fix this so we have a more traditional burn up chart, define an explicit order for the Closed issues by adding the following in our Customizer Script:

customizeChart {
    series ANY color "gainsboro"
    series "Closed" color "navy" order -100
}

This pins all the Closed issues to the bottom of the chart. 

We now have a nice looking, finished burn up chart that also gives us a sense for any scope changes: