Monitoring Project Progress
The Product Owner is responsible to monitor the progress of the whole project toward its goal. This should be done at least once per Sprint Review. The Product Owner determines the amount of remaining work and compares it to the remaining work of the previous Sprints, and forecasts the completion date of the project. All stakeholders should have access to this information.
It’s common to use a burn-down chart to visualize the progress of the whole project. The project burn-down chart shows the amount of remaining work, instead of the amount of completed work; therefore, the line for actual performance goes downward as we proceed and the faster it goes down, the happier we will be!
It’s also common to add a trend-line to the burn-down chart, to get a rough estimate of the completion date. This estimate is based on the assumption that no new items will be added to the Product Backlog and the development capacity will stay the same. It’s expected from a Product Owner to only use this as a guide, and come up with a more reliable forecast for the completion date.
External Resources
- Scrum Guide, a definition of the Scrum framework by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
- The Scrum Master Training Manual, a free ebook on Scrum, and the Professional Scrum Master™ (PSM™ I) exam
- Scrum Awareness, a free email course on Scrum framework