Charts & Metrics | Elixion Docs

Charts live at Charts (/charts), under Insights in the sidebar. The page is headed "Project charts". Everything here is scoped to one project, chosen from the Project selector, or pinned when you are already inside a project.

Elixion, the platform for Engineering Intelligence™, draws these from the work itself, so a chart that has nothing to show says so rather than drawing a flat line.

The tabs

| Tab | What it shows | |-----|---------------| | CFD | Cumulative flow: how work sits across statuses over time | | Burndown | Points remaining in a sprint, day by day | | Velocity | Committed against completed points, sprint by sprint | | Cycle time | Time per finished item, with a mean and control limits | | Throughput | Completed items per period | | Created vs Resolved | Issues opened against issues closed, with the open backlog | | Burnup | Completed work against total scope | | Epic Burndown | Progress of an epic's child issues |

Burndown, Velocity and Burnup appear only for projects that run sprints. CFD, Cycle time, Throughput, Created vs Resolved and Epic Burndown appear for every project.

Controls

Project, unless you are already inside one.
Sprint, on Burndown and Burnup.
Epic, on Epic Burndown.
Date range, on CFD, Cycle time, Throughput and Created vs Resolved. The other tabs take their window from the sprint or epic instead.
Refresh, which refetches the tab you are on.

Reading the burndown

The burndown is the chart people misread most often, so it is worth being precise about what each line is.

Remaining is the actual. It is built from daily readings captured while the sprint is running, and nothing else. A day with no reading is drawn as a gap: no interpolation, no carrying the previous day forward. A gap is the honest answer, not a rendering fault.

Today's point is read live from the sprint's current issues, so the end of the line and the numbers under it can never disagree.

The line stops at today. Only the Ideal runs ahead to the sprint's end, because it is a plan rather than a reading. On a completed sprint no readings are taken after the day it closed, and the days between closing and the planned end are drawn as unmeasured.

Ideal is drawn from the sprint's frozen commitment, the total it carried when it started, not from its current total. Adding work mid sprint therefore cannot re slope the plan.

Scope is a stepped line, so a change reads as a step on the day it landed rather than a slope across the week. Under the chart, a caption states the net: "Scope changed during this sprint: +8 points against a committed baseline of 86." A sprint that swapped equal work gets its own wording rather than being told "+0 points".

Bars beneath show Completed Today and Scope Added.

The four statistics

Total Scope, Completed, Remaining, and an indicator that reads one of three things:

| Indicator | Note under it | Means | |-----------|---------------|-------| | On Track | At the rate since the sprint started | Projected to finish in time | | At Risk | At the rate since the sprint started | Projected to finish late | | At Risk | Nothing delivered since the start | Two readings, no progress between them | | Not enough data | Not enough history yet | Fewer than two readings a day apart | | On Track | All scope delivered | Nothing remaining |

The rate is measured inside the sprint, by differencing the first captured reading against the latest, so work finished before the sprint began cancels out rather than flattering the rate.

"Not enough data" is what a sprint's first day says, and that is the point: an indicator that reads green before anything has happened measures nothing.

When the burndown is blank

No sprint chosen: "Select a sprint to view burndown chart".
A sprint with no captured readings yet: "No burndown data available". Readings are captured by a background job that runs on a daily cycle and only for active sprints, so a sprint that has just started may have only today's live point.
A sprint left active well past its end date is plotted for at most ninety days beyond that date. Completing or cancelling it closes the window.

A sprint's own Reporting tab draws a second burndown from the same data, and its Report tab gives the sprint's committed, added, removed, completed and carried forward figures in issues and points.

The other tabs

CFD stacks Backlog, To Do, In Progress, In Review, Testing and Done over the date range, and reports Total Issues, Completed, WIP, Throughput and Average WIP. Average WIP is the number worth watching: a rising band in the middle of the stack is work piling up in review.

Velocity puts Committed against Completed per sprint, with an average line, and reports Average Velocity over the last ten completed sprints, excluding any that neither committed nor delivered points, the trend, the Standard Deviation and a Predicted Next. The standard deviation is what tells you whether the average means anything.

Cycle time is a control chart, one point per finished item, with reference lines for the Mean and for the upper and lower control limits. It reports Mean Cycle Time, and the 50th, 85th and 95th percentiles. Quote the 85th when you promise a date; the mean hides the tail.

Throughput counts completed items per period, and reports Total Completed, Average per Period and the number of periods.

Created vs Resolved bars created against resolved, with cumulative open issues as a line, and reports Total Created, Total Resolved, Net Change and the direction. A net change that stays positive is a backlog growing faster than the team closes it.

Burnup draws completed points against total scope, and reports Baseline, Delivered points, Scope Change and points delivered. Where the burndown shows whether you will finish, the burnup shows whether the finish line moved.

Epic Burndown draws remaining and completed points against total scope for one epic's children, and reports Total Points, Completed, Remaining, Velocity per Day, an on track indicator, and a breakdown of its issues by status.