The first of a new series of Coad Letter's has been published at the Borland Developer Network - Using Cumulative Flow Diagrams. This is one of several which make up the content of two papers I'll be giving at the Borland Developer Conference in September.

Introduction

Agile software development methods such as Scrum and Feature Driven Development manage and report project progress in a very different manner than traditional critical path project management. Scrum started with the use of a "burn down" chart which plotted the estimated number of hours remaining to complete the Sprint backlog. More recently "burn up" charts have become popular. These plot the number of completed Stories, Tasks or Features on the project with a projected completion target. It is possible to extrapolate the plot with a trend line to estimate the completion date of a project.

The concept of a "burn up" chart had been used in Feature Driven Development since its inception in the late 1990's. It's called a Feature Complete Graph as shown here.

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