Burndown for Trello started as a side project to help plan our projects and BlueLine. We have always used the Trello platform to manage our sprints and to track our progress. One big thing that was lacking from that, however, is the ability to track your hours and view your progress in a meaningful visual way. Thankfully someone had made the Scrum for Trello Chrome plugin which allows you to assign point values to different cards easily in browser.

We have since taken partial control of that plugin and ported it to Firefox and Chrome. Using the “time spent” and “time completed” data input via Scrum for Trello, we built some extra functionality which takes that data via the Trello API and organizes it into a Burndown (and now a Burnup) chart. This allows us to easily see the pace that we are developing on. It helps us keep our sprint loads in check and gives us a good indication of how well we are hitting our goals and what we can change in the future to achieve them more successfully.

What began as an in-house pet project turned into a revenue generating product. We cleaned up the interface and allowed people to sign up for free accounts as well as made paid accounts with additional features such as accessing the charts directly in Trello.

The site is built entirely using a combination of PHP, mySQL, HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery.