Release burndown charts track how much work is left to do before release. To track this successfully, we need to know which stories are in the next release. It is straightforward if we're using index cards to maintain our backlog; we merely separate them into multiple decks representing each release. 

To start tracking how long it is before we can release, we first have to estimate all stories in the release. We then add up the number of Story Points to find out how big the release is.

We'll now look at two different types of release burndown chart. For both types, we show the total number of Story Points on the vertical axis and the number of Story Points remaining after each Sprint on the horizontal axis.