It’s been pretty impossible to get the management team to come up with the total story points in the next release, or for our latest project. Because of this, it makes it very difficult to burn down story points for estimating velocity of getting the next release in to production.

After reading around for a little bit and getting an email from a past agile coach which confirmed my suspicions, I decided to just add up the points weekly, having a line which plots up the y axis.

The team really likes this approach. They have a more positive feeling to see a line trending upwards. There has been a release to production because the amount of work accomplished since starting Scrum has warranted it.

The amount of features and the story points wanted and needed in the developing product can shift without having to erase the line and re-plotting to a new story point total. Our Product Owner can easily estimate duration by looking at our velocity and determine what scope shift will do to the deliverable date.