Burn Up Charts

Overview

Burn up charts are a classic way to track program, project or team progress against a specified scope and a known set 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 the report configuration options, set up your report as follows:

Option	Selection	Comments
Time Period	any	Select the dates of interest using relative dates ("Last 3 Months", "This Year") or a custom Start Date and End Date.
Search	any	Select the Jira projects, project categories and filters of interest. Alternatively, click on the JQL tab in the same field to enter a detailed search query using Jira Query Language (JQL).
Statuses to Include	See comments	Select the Jira issue statuses to be included in the report. Some of the following options work well for a burn-up chart: select All for for a complete picture of scope, including scope changes and completed issues. select Exclude Selected if there are a small number of status types that should be excluded from the report (and then enter the statuses to be excluded in the field below). select Include Selected in order to chart only selected statuses. For example, Resolved and Closed can be selected to show only completed issues.
Value Of	Status (Historical)	This report reporting on the historical status of each issue as it was set during each individual reporting interval.
Chart Type		Select the Column Chart.

Next, click Run Report to create your report.  

If the report includes multiple statuses to show a complete picture of scope, scope changes and completed issues, the chart will look something like this:

If only Closed issues are included, the chart will show a simple burn up of completed issues:

Story Points Burn Up Chart

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

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

Option	Selection	Comments
Time Period	any	Select the dates of interest using relative dates ("Last 3 Months", "This Year") or a custom Start Date and End Date.
Search	any	Select the Jira projects, project categories and filters of interest. Alternatively, click on the JQL tab in the same field to enter a detailed search query using Jira Query Language (JQL).
Statuses to Include	See comments	Select the Jira issue statuses to be included in the report. Some of the following options work well for a burn-up chart: select All for for a complete picture of scope, including scope changes and completed issues. select Exclude Selected if there are a small number of status types that should be excluded from the report (and then enter the statuses to be excluded in the field below). select Include Selected in order to chart only selected statuses. For example, Resolved and Closed can be selected to show only completed issues.
Value Of	Story Points	Sum the number of story points for each issue.
Segment By	Status (Historical)	Segment the results by 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 the 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 multiple projects, select Project under Segment By to see each project's contribution to the results. Alternatively, select Issue Type or Assignee or any combination of the above for even more detailed analysis.

In the following report, the results are segmented by both Project and Issue Type:

Reporting Based on Sprints

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

For the Search field on the report configuration page, click 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 the report on the data of greatest interest, use a Dataplane Customizer Script to choose custom colors for the chart.  

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

Next, 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 is what a burn up chart looks like with customized colors:

Ordering Chart Series

In the chart from the previous section, the Closed issues occupy the middle range of the chart. The statuses are being ordered automatically using the natural status ordering, but this placement is not ideal for a burn up chart.

To make the output appear as a more-traditional burn up chart, define an explicit order for the Closed-status issues by adding the following 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. 

The chart now appears as a nice looking, finished burn-up chart that also gives us a sense for any scope changes:

Adding Scope Lines

Although your chart can provide an indication of scope using the methods described in the previous section, some users may also wish to add explicit scope/goal lines to the burn-up chart. This can be accomplished by adding annotations to the chart.

For example, if we start with a burn-up chart that includes only closed issues, such as the chart shown below:

We can add a scope line to emphasize particular points on the chart. In this scenario, if the project scope remained constant for the first two weeks, but a number of issues were added during the last week of the sprint, this can be clearly marked on the graph.

To do so, add the following Customizer Script to the chart:

customizeChart {
    lineAnnotation "Scope 8/01 through 8/14" from ("2013-08-01", 55) to ("2013-08-14", 55) color "black" style "dotted"
    lineAnnotation "Scope 8/14 through 8/21" from ("2013-08-14", 67) to ("2013-08-22", 67) color "black" style "dotted"
}

Each lineAnnotation keyword adds a new line segment to the chart. The from and to keywords allow you to designate the X and Y coordinates of the starting and ending points of the line. For example, the first lineAnnotation indicates that the project scope contained 55 issues from August 1 through August 14. The second lineAnnotation indicates that the project scope from August 14 to August 22 contained 67 issues.

The resulting chart looks like this:

For more details on the types of annotations you can add to a chart using Customizer Scripts, see Adding Goal Lines and Target Areas to Charts.