doc/user/project/milestones/burndown_and_burnup_charts.md
{{< details >}}
{{< /details >}}
Burndown and burnup show progress toward completing a milestone. Burndown charts show the remaining issues (burndown) over the course of a project milestone. Burnup charts show the total number of issues against completed issues.
Burndown and burnup charts share some general features. Both burndown and burnup charts:
Differences between burndown and burnup charts are:
To switch between the two settings, select either Issues or Issue weight above the charts.
When sorting by weight, make sure all your issues have a weight assigned, because issues with no weight are not represented in the remaining weight totals.
Burndown and burnup charts provide valuable insights when tracking milestone progress. Their use depends on how you structure your milestones in your workflow.
These charts help teams:
Use burndown charts to focus on remaining work. Use burnup charts to track both completed work and scope changes over time. Burnup charts are particularly useful for monitoring scope creep (uncontrolled additions to a project's scope) by showing spikes in the chart's total issues.
Burndown charts show the number of issues over the course of a milestone.
At a glance, you see the current state for the completion a given milestone. Without them, you would have to organize the data from the milestone and plot it yourself to have the same sense of progress.
GitLab plots it for you and presents it in a clear and beautiful chart.
<i class="fa-youtube-play" aria-hidden="true"></i> For an overview, check the video demonstration on Mapping work versus time with burndown charts.
To view a project's burndown chart:
To view a group's burndown chart:
A burndown chart is available for every project or group milestone that has been attributed a start date and a due date.
[!note] You're able to promote project to group milestones and still see the burndown chart for them, respecting license limitations.
The chart indicates the project's progress throughout that milestone (for issues assigned to it).
In particular, it shows how many issues were or are still open for a given day in the milestone's corresponding period.
You can also toggle the burndown chart to display the cumulative open issue weight for a given day.
For milestones created before GitLab 13.6, burndown charts have an additional toggle to switch between Legacy and Fixed views.
| Legacy | Fixed |
|---|---|
Fixed burndown charts track the full history of milestone activity, from its creation until the milestone expires. After the milestone due date passes, issues removed from the milestone no longer affect the chart.
Legacy burndown charts track when issues were created and when they were last closed, not their full history. For each day, a legacy burndown chart takes the number of open issues and the issues created that day, and subtracts the number of issues closed that day. Issues that were created and assigned a milestone before its start date (and remain open as of the start date) are considered as having been opened on the start date. Therefore, when the milestone start date is changed, the number of opened issues on each day may change. Reopened issues are considered as having been opened on the day after they were last closed.
Burnup charts show the assigned and completed work for a milestone.
To view a project's burnup chart:
To view a group's burnup chart:
Burnup charts have separate lines for total work and completed work:
When an open issue is moved to another milestone, the Total line goes down but the Completed line stays the same. The Completed line remains unchanged because it only tracks issues that are closed.
When an issue is closed, the Total line remains the same and the Completed line goes up.
{{< details >}}
{{< /details >}}
{{< history >}}
rollup_timebox_chart. Disabled by default.{{< /history >}}
[!flag] On GitLab Self-Managed, by default this feature is not available. For more information, see the history. This feature is available for testing, but not ready for production use.
With tasks, a more granular planning is possible. If this feature is enabled, the weight of issues that have tasks is derived from the tasks in the same milestone. Issues with tasks are not counted separately in burndown or burnup charts.
How issue weight is counted in charts:
Example 1
The charts for Milestone 1 would show Task 1 as having weight 2.
The charts for Milestone 2 would show Issue as having weight 4.
Example 2
The charts for Milestone 1 would show Task 1 as having weight 0.
The charts for Milestone 2 would show Issue as having weight 5.
Example 3
The charts for Milestone 1 would show Task 1 as having weight 2.
The charts for Milestone 2 would show Issue as having weight 4.
A limitation of these charts is that the days are in the UTC time zone.
This can cause the graphs to be inaccurate in other timezones. For example: