How to Measure Release Burndown

Learn about Release Burndown, including how to measure it, and leverage it in dashboards and visualizations with Metabase.

What is Release Burndown?

Keeping a schedule is an essential part of a product’s release. Calculating your release burndown can tell you post-release how your project’s schedule went. You’ll be using your release burndown for both your team and as a way to publicly show what’s going on with your current release since launch. Release burndown also helps you predict your ROI, which can help you guide stakeholders on ROI expectations. You’ll be able to give them insight into what’s going on for each sprint based on velocity and developer estimations.

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Graphs of Release Burndown

How to calculate Release Burndown

Release burndown is represented in a graph, comparing the number of story points remaining (which equates to the amount of work required to complete) and sprint (which equates to time). The graph will show the initial story points in the positive, while the added user stories will be a negative number, showing the ROI. When you visualize release burndown this way, it gives you space to continue showing predictions for your burndown, giving a realistic idea of what your ROI looks like.

Other KPIs to measure related to Release Burndown

  • Security Vulnerabilities — open vulnerabilities by severity and age across your stack.
  • Service Line Health Impact — how infrastructure and service issues translate into business-line health.
  • Soak Testing — system stability under sustained load over extended periods.
  • Static Code Analysis — findings from automated code scans — defects, smells, and security issues.
  • Time to Patch — how quickly known vulnerabilities get patched in production.
  • Velocity — story points completed per sprint — a planning signal, not a productivity score.
  • Application Change Time — how long application changes take to move from request to running in production.
  • Application Monitoring — coverage and health of the monitoring that watches your applications in production.
  • Change Volume — how much change ships per period — commits, pull requests, or releases.

Why build a dashboard for Release Burndown?

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How to use Metabase to measure Release Burndown

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