• Current Burn-up Trend - This trend represents the current throughput of team within the selected time period. The trend shows the slope of Cards processed into the selected Done lane from the selected start date up to the current date. This trend is then projected out to the selected end date to show the number of Cards that would be processed based on the current throughout.* Ideal Burn-up Trend - This trend represents the required slope necessary to process all the Work In Process up to the selected Burn-up Lane (end lane) for the specified time frame. This slope shows you what your throughput should be in order to complete the work in process.* Required Burn-up Trend - This trend demonstrates the throughput that is required to burn through the remaining Work In Process from the current date up to the specified end date.
• Overall WIP Trend - This trend lets you know the rate of growth across your entire Work In Process.  You can compare the slope of this line against the slope of the Current Burn-up Trend. This will tell you if your overall WIP is increasing, in other words, is the amount of work entering the system greater than the amount of work being completed by the system

Using these trend lines, teams can get an good understanding of how quickly they are processing work and whether the current velocity is sufficient to process the work within a system over a given time frame. The information presented also informs teams of what rate is required to complete the remaining work from the current date.

Including the Burn-up Trajectory in the CFD

To include the Burn-up trajectory trends in the CFD diagram, you will need to check the "Calculate Burn-up Trajectory" located in the Additional Criteria section underneath the chart area. After checking this option, you will be presented with some additional criteria.

Criteria

• Burn-up Lane - Specifies the the Lane that will be used to calculate the burn-up trajectory. Any Work in Process contained in the lanes that precede this lane will be used determine the final burn-up destination.
• Time Period - Allows you to select the start and finish date for which you wish to calculate the burn up. The Start date must be less than or equal to the current date. The Finish date must be a point in time in the future.
• Include Cards added since iteration start - This tells the calculation to include any cards that are added between the specified start time and the current date. Uncheck this value if you do not wish to include these cards.

All the standard criteria for the CFD can be applied with one exception, you cannot exclude a lane that is follows the selected Burn-up Lane.

Interpreting the Burn-up Trajectory

After running the CFD with the Burn-up Trajectory, you will see that there are some additional graph elements included. You will also see that the end date on the graph extends to the selected end date for the Burn-up trajectory. Lets take a look at an example of the output.

In the example above, we can see that our overall WIP within the systems is increasing by about 0.43 Cards a day. In order to process all the WIP from the specified start date to the end date, we would need to average about 0.55 Cards a day.  As you can see our throughout has actually been about 0.21 Cards a day.  Therefore we are not on track to process all of the WIP before the end date. In order to catch up and finish all the work, we will now need to complete 0.87 Cards a day for the remainder of the time frame.