thefrugalprogrammer

I really wish Jira had a 'windowed' burndown chart with probable outcomes. (Caveat: It may actually have this already, and since we just started using Jira I don't know how to turn it on.)

Instead of just having the projected burn down rate, give a probability based on how many items are in development and in QA.

For example, this chart shows us being late. But 2 items are in development, and 2 are in QA, so the actual likelihood of being late should be less:

There's obviously some UI issues; we have a custom workflow, for example, and it could get cumbersome to map that over to a different flow. But the number of times I have to hear "we should give you more work" because it looks like we are ahead of schedule (when we aren't) or "we're way behind we'll never make it" (when we aren't) would be drastically reduced.

It's easy to say it's a training issue, but given the variable nature of the chart it's a constant training issue (aka, time sink).

I'm all for showing projected throughput, but if we are going to do it then we should be able to adhere to some agile QA (breadth / depth) checkpoints without freaking the rest of the company out.