Burndown chart: tasks, features or software metrics? [closed]

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I'm developing an app for agile projects management, and I'm wondering what is the measure unit of a Burndown Chart... Wikipedia's article states that it measures the number of tasks remaining each period of time, but I've seen people using it with tasks, features, function/use case points...

Is there a measure unit that is considered "right" or standard between these? Or is it all by choice?

Answer 1

Simply, the burndown chart shows work remaining at a point in time.

The x-axis is usually time and the y-axis is usually work.

For a Sprint Burndown, time is most often expressed in days and work is expressed in task hours

For a Release Burndown, time is often expressed in Sprints and work is expressed in Story Points

Answer 2

I have typically seen brundown charts in terms of story points. Story points are used as a measure of complexity of a story and is a numeric value with no unit. The burndown chart starts at the agreed upon velocity on the y-axis and burns down to zero as a function of time. If stories are added during the sprint you may burn into the negative numbers of the y-axis to represent the total velocity.

The goal is to have the burndown follow a linear trend line, but that is hard to achieve since it would mean that everyone must complete the same amount of points per time unit every day