How to Validate and Calibrate your Sprint Plan with Burndown Charts

If you make a search for the term "burn down chart", you are presented with more than a million results on that subject.  Wikipedia defines it as a graphical representation of work left to do versus time, but for me it is much more than that.  Burndown charts can be used on sprint and release levels to give a great deal of information in a very compact format.

While some agilists prefer to plot hours of work versus iteration days, I strongly support plotting story point vs iteration days, given that the business value is realized when stories are completed and not by how...