[teampractices] Examples of dysfunction visibly in a burnup chart

Wed Jul 15 23:43:17 UTC 2015

Hi,

In anticipation of getting some burnup charts, I'm working on Mock up
burnup/CFD charts showing examples of different patterns and anti-patterns
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100708>.  Here are the top two examples
that came to mind; I am looking for feedback on these and for other
examples of problems in a Scrum team that burnup charts can reveal.

This chart shows a bottleneck in QA.  Developers are coding stories faster
than the QA team can keep up, and so a bunch of In Testing stories pile up
and overall Doneness lags.  This could be because the QA team is
short-handed, or because they don't have the tools to test efficiently.  It
could also show that testers are are sending things back with questions,
but failing to change the state back to In Development.

The hockey stick burnup shows a bunch of stories being completed in the
last day of the sprint.  Note also that In Development shoots up early.
This probably suggests that the stories  developers are working on are too
big or too interdependent.  QA seems to be keeping up, but I would be very
skeptical that the stories passing testing in the last day really got the
same quality of testing.

Do you have more examples like this, especially of patterns you have
actually seen out in the wild?

*Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation
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