Explanation for project homepage's Task Graphs

Our project's home page has a widget item called "Task Graphs". The item has three graphs: Task Velocity, Task Burnup, and Task Burndown.

Can somebody please explain those graphs? Here is information from the user manual with questions:

Task Velocity – this graph shows the total estimated and actual effort delivered in each project release and/or iteration

Please explain the graph's vertical/Y axis. Where do the numbers come from? How were they calculated? What do they mean? For example, why would one of our releases have an actual task velocity of 1690?

Task Burnup – this graph shows the cumulative amount of work outstanding for each release/iteration in the project with separate lines for the estimated, remaining and completed effort.
Task Burndown – this graph shows the remaining work that needs to be done for each release/iteration in the project with separate lines for the estimated, remaining and completed effort.

Neither of these graphs will display if releases is set to "All Releases". This is okay with us, but we're curious if this is the expected behavior.
The horizontal/X axis appears to be dates, but they are illegible. They appear to be overlapping. Is there any way to change this? (Some graphing tools have concept of major and minor tick marks, and only the major tick marks have labels. Perhaps that would be appropriate here?)
Effort is measured in hours on tasks, correct?
Is effort a sum of both tasks that are associated with the release (or iteration) and tasks that are associated with requirements that are associated with the release?
How is ideal effort calculated?

FYI, I did search for answers to my question but I did not find any. (Specifically, I tried to find answers by searching for the terms "velocity" and "burndown". Maybe I missed something.)

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2 Replies

Jim R.

re: Jon Freed on Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014

Hi Jon

There graphs are based on Tasks and so the Y-axis on all three is hours (rather than just # tasks). Incidentally in our next release (v4.2) there is a new set of requirement graphs that show requirements velocity, burnup and burndown and those are based on story points.

The burnup and burndown do not show when you show 'All Releases' because they do not make sense in that context, the backlog for release 1 is unrelated to the backlog for release 2.

If you need a larger view (because of the date-ranges) you can also show these in the main Reports tab. On this page you can get the widget to display full width which gives more room for the x-axis if you need.
For these graphs it is only tasks that are directly associated with the release or iteration.

Regards

Jim

Jon Freed

re: Jim R. on Monday, September 8, 2014
Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Thank you for the helpful response. We are still wondering the following:

How is Expected and Actual Task Velocity calculated in SpiraTeam? (Based on your response the unit of work appears to be hours, but what is the interval, and what is Expected based on?)
For the Task Burnup & Burndown charts, is effort a sum of tasks associated with the release, its iterations, and/or its requirements? Some of those but not the others? (In other words, which Tasks are included in the calculation?)
For those Burn charts, how is ideal effort calculated?

Thanks!

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Started: 9/2/2014
Last Reply: 9/10/2014
Replies: 2
Views: 842

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