Sublinear: all you need in a burndown tool, no more.

Burndown charts: managers love them, many smart Agile gurus hate them. Ron Jefferies has disowned even the concept of story points. A recent video from Bob Hartman and Peter Saddington labels burndown charts as more BS than Agile.

Part of me agrees with the haters. Tools like Jira, Zenhub, and Linear leave me cold. They are complex and include features that encourage bad practices, including letting you assign

• iterations to stories, when we know that such predictions are fictions
• priority labels to stories, when we know that leads to all stories being top priority
• team members to stories, when we know that you should pull stories from the top

But on the other hand, burndown charts have been critical in my agile development courses at Northwestern. They are how clients learn to be realistic about what will get done, put high value stories first, and seriously de-scope early in a project. 

Here's my alternative. My vision of what a project tracking tool should look like, in a Google Sheet.

Here's the sample sheet. Feel free to copy and play with it.

To me, the most important aspect of this tool is that it puts the stories front and center. Not graphs, not velocity. The focus is on what stories might get done, and what stories probably won't get done. As always, less is more.

But if you also want a chart, here's a version that does that too.