Synchronization Explained
Burndown transforms Basecamp’s to-do lists to burndown charts. The information contained on each to-do item is a key aspect for that transformation. Lets explain how this transformation works and how burndown reacts to the information stored on the to-do items.
Synchronizing
When you create a burndown chart, you need to tell to burndown what project and milestone is going to be related to that chart. Every time you click the synchronization button, burndown connects to your Basecamp account and retrieves all the to-do lists that are related to the milestone to which the burndown chart is bound.
If no to-do list is found to be related to the milestone, burndown will generate an empty chart. The empty chart will look like this:
Every to-do item is analyzed to calculate an Effort Left value. This analysis consists on reading the last word of each to-do item. If burndown doesn’t recognize this word as a number, it assumes that the value of the item is 1 (you might only want to count the number of tasks that you have submitted).
On the other hand, if burndown is able to recognize that last word as a number, then the item will have that number as a value. Once burndown gives a value to each item, it proceeds to add those values to calculate the Effort Left. This value is what finally gets plotted to the chart.
It’s important to notice that a synchronization will only produce one value. This value is going to be bound to the date in which the synchronization happened. Since a burndown chart is a trend of Effort Left values during a sequence of dates, you will be able to notice this trend until more than one day of data is synchronized. Thus the first time I synchronize an iteration I will see a chart like this one:
NOTE: This behavior has been modified. Now you should see a diagonal line starting from the amount of work in the first sync, all the way down to zero in the last date of the iteration. The guide will be updated soon to show this change.
If I perform changes on the to-do items in basecamp and synchronize again the chart, it will seem like the chart hasn’t changed at all. Perhaps the line moved a little bit down this time:
But if I perform the changes on the following day, the trend will start to appear:
Recognized Effort Values
Now that we have a better understanding on how the burndown chart shows us the trends of effort left, lets discuss how the to-do items’ description affect the “Effort Left”.
- Simple real numbers: 1, 0.1, 2.5, 100.
- Real numbers with a descriptor character in the end: 1h, 0.1h, 2.5h, 100h.
- Real numbers enclosed in brackets: [1], [0.1], [2.5], [100]
- Real numbers enclosed in brackets with descriptors: [1h], [0.1h], [2.5h], [100h]
Regarding descriptors, these can be any alphabetical character. There’s no special unit conversion managed by burndown. If you have a task with “30m” and another one with “1h”, that will add to a total effort of 31. Descriptor characters are provided as a way to visually improve the appearance of your to-do items in Basecamp.
The following list describes how the description is interpreted by burndown:- “foo bar” translates to a 1.
- “foo bar 1” translates to a 1.
- “foo bar 2h” translates to a 2.
- “foo bar [2.5]” translates to a 2.5.
- “foo bar [3.5h]” translates to a 3.5.
So if all the previous 5 to-do items are analyzed by burndown, the effort left calculated will be 10.