Quick and easy custom filtered burn downs

Today I am going to show you how to create quick little burn down charts right off of a work item query.

As you may well know the burn down chart in TFS is based on the remaining work field in the task work item. It queries all the tasks in the corresponding iteration and shows how the remaining work changes each day during the iteration.

This is great if you are a scrum team, it's all you need to know.

I have a lot of customers that use TFS that are not using Scrum or are even that agile. However they love the idea of a burn down report. However they want to see it with different filters applied.

Perhaps by individual or by activity or Area Path. Remember not everyone follows the agile manifesto 100%. Don’t judge. :)

Back to our quick burn downs.

First we need to create a work item query that defines the scope of our burn down. Since it’s a query and not the iteration backlog we can grab any tasks we want we can create a burn down that crosses teams and iterations.

So lets keep it simple for now and create a query that gets all the tasks for the current iteration.

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Now add the a few columns to the query. We’ll need Remaining Work since that is the key to our Burn Down. Lets also grab Activity, Area Path and Assigned To for our example

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Now over to the Charts section of the query. (Make sure you have saved the query so you can make a chart.)

Create a new chart and select a Line Trend report.

Under Values change Count to Sum and select Remaining Work as the field to Sum.

Pick your Rolling period. This is how far back you want to start the burn down.

Now select your Group By field. This is where you can define if you want to see the burn down by Activity or Team Member or Area Path.

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There is no projection beyond today or an ideal trend line, but I am sure you can visualize that.

With charts you can make a bunch of these, each with their own “group by” field to augment the burn down for your teams iteration.