Can't find Burndown chart.

Edit Subject

Which process template are you using? By default, the burndown chart is only available with the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template as it requires the Sprint work item type which defines your sprints' starting and ending dates.

If you are using MSF Agile 5.0 or another process template which doesn't define a work item type that contains sprint starting and ending dates, you could activate the Burndown chart by adding a new work item type in your projects. You would then need to create a custom mapping file to tell Urban Turtle which work item type to use as its sprint details container.

We use a MSF Agile template and it has many reports, for example Burndown and Burn rate. Why is urbanturtle so bound to Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template ?
//Thomas

The Hour Burndown report included with Urban Turtle is not one of the reports included with many process templates. It is a custom Burndown report built by the Urban Turtle team. It calculates data in real time as opposed to reports built on SQL Server Reporting Services which suffer from some delays with the TFS Warehouse.

The burndown requires start and end dates to work. Since iterations in TFS do not have such dates, common scrum templates such as Scrum for Team System and Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 use a "sprint" work item type to work-around this issue. This is why we have chosen to rely on such a work item type to enable the burndown. You can roll your own sprint type to your project and enable the burndown with very little configuration changes in Urban Turtle.

We also use the MSF Agile 5.0 template to which we have added a Removed state to enable the Recycle Bin features and a Sprint work item type (copied from Scrum 1.0) to enable the burndown.

thanks

Can i get more info on what steps we have to do to get the Burndown report working with MSF Agile 5.0 template. Many thanks.

The quickest way is to take the Sprint work item type definition from Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, add it to your project via witadmin.exe (documented here) and change your Urban Turtle mapping file.

The files are located by default under 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project'. You are most likely using MSF Agile 5.0, so I suggest that you copy this file, change its name (an attribute at the top of the file) and add the sprint element from the Scrum 1.0 mapping file. Then, configure your project to use your new mapping file by choosing the Configuration option from the Project menu on the planning board.