I’ve been advocating that we include the impediments on our Scrum burndown chart where I work, in order to visualise where we could have been if we’d been able to eliminate them. As a result, we now have a burndown chart which looks like this:
This is an artificial chart with fake data, but it shows the idea – that by including a series in the chart which shows the time spent on impediments subtracted from the burndown, we can see where we would have been if there were no impediments: in the fake chart above, we’d actually have finished a full day earlier…
Most of our impediments are support cases which we can’t really remove, but the statistics helps us make room for them when planning our sprints.
