# Read a sprint's burn chart

> Follow a sprint day by day with a burn down or burn up chart, see what the lines mean, and know where Prior gets its numbers.

Source: https://priortasks.com/docs/agile/burn-charts/
Last updated: 2026-11-05

A burn chart shows how a sprint is going, one day at a time. It answers "will we finish what we planned?" earlier than the last day. It sits above the sprint cards on the **Sprints** tab of a Scrum project.

> [!pro] Burn charts are part of Scrum
> They follow the **project owner's** plan, like the other sprint tools. Kanban and Scrumban projects do not have them. See [Choose Kanban, Scrum or Scrumban](https://priortasks.com/docs/agile/kanban-scrum-scrumban/).

## Choose what to see

The chart opens on the running sprint, or on the last finished one. With several sprints, a menu lets you pick another. Two buttons switch the view:

- **Burn down** draws the work still to do ("Remaining") against the **Ideal** line. The ideal starts at the points planned on the first day and falls in a straight line to 0 on the last day. Above the ideal line, you are behind. Below it, you are ahead.
- **Burn up** draws the work done ("Done") and the total scope ("Scope"), with the ideal line rising from 0 to the points planned. When the scope line steps up, work was added during the sprint.

A vertical **Today** marker shows where you are. Days still to come stay empty, and only the ideal line reaches the end. Hover or tap a day to read its values. With the chart focused, the left and right arrow keys move from day to day.

The chart counts story points. When no task of the sprint has points yet, it counts tasks and says so: "In issues (nothing estimated)". It reloads a moment after a task of the sprint changes status, points or sprint.

## Where the numbers come from

Prior rebuilds each day from the history of changes it stores for your tasks. Because a sprint only keeps its current list of tasks, the chart has two limits:

- The scope is the sprint's tasks as they are now. A task removed from the sprint disappears from past days too.
- A task counts from the day Prior first saved it, or from the start of the sprint if it existed before, not from the day you added it to the sprint.

When the history cannot be loaded, for example offline or for a project that never reached Prior's servers, the chart is built from your tasks as they are now and is marked **Estimated**. A completed task then counts on the day it was last changed, and re-estimates and reopened tasks are not known.

## Good to know

- Everyone in the project, viewers included, can read the chart.
- Days use your time zone.
- A screen reader gets a one-sentence summary such as "Sprint 4: 18 of 26 pts left on Oct 7." and a table of every day.