In order to gain a sense of progress and completion, it’s helpful to do more than look at the numbers. Visualizing the numbers, and how they change over time, will give you a quick and clear sense of progress, at least to the extent that you’re measuring actual progress.
The simplest and clearest way to make progress (or lack thereof) visible and understandable is to use a BurnUp Chart. We’ll explore them more deeply in BurnUp Charts. For now, let the X axis of a Cartesian chart represent time. On the Y axis, periodically plot the current value of the measure of progress you’re using and the current estimate of the goal of that same measure.
What Progress Looks Like
"Have you got a minute?" Sidney asked.
"Sure, come in." Ryan replied.
"I just wanted to show you what the progress on our Walking Skeleton system looks like. I’ve sketched it on my whiteboard."
Sidney continued, "It’s early yet, and given the nature of software development there are certainly time-consuming surprises waiting for us to discover them. I’ve projected out to the minimal system we talked about based on our current rate of progress."
"Oh, that looks good. I can’t wait to see it."
This BurnUp Chart shows steady progress of the system’s functional capability over time. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee that progress is a steady as it looks. The sizing of the different functional slices is critical to the progress indication. If a function was shown as larger, it would make the progress look faster, but that might not be meaningful in the long run. And progress over time presumes a steady application of effort over that time. If the team were distracted by some other work, the progress would slow down. If both of these conditions were true, progress might look smooth and steady when it was anything but that.
In the short run, this can be deceiving. Over time, though, discrepancies tend to cancel each other out, and the visualization is reasonably accurate. Don’t hesitate to dig deeper if something doesn’t “seem right” about what is displayed, though. The visualization is a tool to help you spot things that don’t match your other feelings about progress.
