No good sprint ever worked mostly on a hunch. Sprint planning involves a detailed understanding of capacity planning, detailed estimates, risk mitigation, strategic impact, and human empathy. The burnup chart is an excellent tool to visualize your team's progress and forecast their chances of meeting their sprint goal successfully, based on their actual historical velocity. Use it during daily standups or retrospectives to adjust your team's commitments, assess progress, and iterate towards work that delivers on time, with high confidence.
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Configure the report
Navigate to Reports -> Burnup to access the burnup chart. Use the filters at the top of the report to configure it further:
Sprint: Select the sprint you want to view. By default, the chart looks at your current sprint, but you can view the burnup for any historical sprint in your team (and it will remember your last selection if you need to access the chart again).
Record type: The burnup chart shows all record types by default. You can focus on Features or Requirements instead.
Estimation units: Choose whether to view progress on the chart by the amount of Time or Story points your team logged during the sprint, or by a simple Record count of records your team completed.
If you do not see the Estimation units you expect here, review your team's capacity planning settings. To do this, navigate to User menu -> Settings -> Team -> Capacity planning. The Estimate in toggle lets you switch between Time and Story points.
Track sprint progress
First, let's orient you to the major elements of the burnup chart. The blue line in the burnup chart represents the current scope of work in the sprint, and the green shaded area represents work your team has completed (in Record count or Estimates). Each data point in the chart is a day in your selected sprint.
In an ideal sprint, you would see the green shaded area grow over time to meet the blue line on the last day of the sprint. No sprint is ever ideal, so this chart is useful in tracking your progress over time, noting significant changes to scope or progress, and adjusting so that you can meet your sprint goals.
For more detail on any particular day:
Hover over a data point. The burnup chart will display a summary of actions taken during the day, as well as a forecast for that day, based on your team's historical velocity.
Click on any data point. A pre-built list report will open in a drawer with all actions taken on that day. Click on any record to see or adjust details, or click View full report to move to the report for a deeper dive (or a different visualization). Click outside of the drawer to close it and return to the burnup chart.
Forecast sprint completion
Unlike the burndown chart, which tracks your progress against the scope when the sprint officially started, the burnup chart will adjust as you make changes to the sprint, and provides you with forecasts based on your team's historical velocity. The burnup will start forecasting once you have completed at least one sprint, and will use the last six completed sprints in your team so it can generate accurate forecasts.
The forecasting lines each have different meanings:
The green Trend line looks at your current sprint, not historical velocity. It assumes you will keep completing records at your current pace, and extrapolates from there.
The blue Best line finds your fastest historical pace, and extrapolates based on that. If your team works as fast as they ever have, this is the date you could finish the remaining work in the sprint.
The grey Average line finds your historical average, and extrapolates based on that. If your team works this sprint like it usually does, this is the date you could finish the remaining work.
The red Worst line looks at the slowest historical pace, and extrapolates based on that. If your team works as slow as they ever have, this is the date you could finish the remaining work.
If these forecasts do not match the sprint's end date, you can make adjustments. If you are forecasted to finish early, add work. If even your Best line suggests you will not make it in time, the burnup is an excellent data-based tool to start a conversation. As you add or remove records (or adjust estimates) in your sprint, the forecast lines will adjust.
Want help reading the burnup chart? Open the Aha! AI assistant while you are viewing the chart. It will automatically have the chart added as context for any prompt you give it.
Share your burnup chart
With your burnup chart completed, you can easily share it with your stakeholders by selecting one of the export options under the Share menu button on the top right of the screen.
To export your report to a whiteboard, click the Export menu and add the report as an image or as a view.
To invite people outside of your Aha! account to view your report, navigate to Share -> Web -> Manage webpage.
Note: Information visible on hover is only visible to logged-in Aha! account users.To schedule recurring email delivery of your report, navigate to Share -> Email schedule.
For a static version of your report, export your report to PNG image or PDF document.