Before we create the burndown, let us give a quick explanation of what a burndown chart is for.  The burndown helps your team see the status of the project. An XP or Scrum project uses some type of report like this updated frequently (in our case 2 - 3 times a week).  Post this report in the team room to make it highly visible to the team.

Use the burndown chart to show how many points you started with in your project, and over time, how many remain in your project. The chart shows the (hopefully) downward trend of the points completed for each iteration. 

As we work through each iteration, our team finishes a certain amount of points. This series of articles assumes that we capture those points for the team in a scenario work item in TFS. With TFS as the backend for your reporting, keep in mind that you have version information there that can be added to the data shown in this report.

For the data to create the burndown chart, I assume that TFS fields are used in the same manner elaborated on in Part 1. We use the MSF Agile templates when creating the workspace for this project. The field Rank is used to capture iteration information.  The Rough Order of Magnitude field captures the number of points for the story. 

Some of the other fields can be used when you need to do more analysis. For instance, the date fields are helpful when looking at when more points are added to the total. Using that data for a report is beyond the scope of this article, but we may explore that later.