The First Burndown Chart Often Burns Up

Teams new to Scrum and/or agile development will often stand by helplessly as their first iteration's burndown seems only to burn up.  Quickly they learn that they may be signing up for too much work or did not spend enough time exporting and planning the work that was signed up for.  As unfortunate as this may seem, this is agile development working, NOT agile not working.  The sooner you visualize and understand the risk, the better.  You might not like what you see, but you see it.  This is what we often refer to "Visibility whether you like it or not". 

This empirical learning process is a fundamental part of agile.  There is nothing like experiencing an early iteration or Sprint spiral out of control to help guide future iterations.  While some teams may never experience the pain of an iteration run amuck, to others, it is a right of passage.  It may be easy to look at the results of a first iteration (and the burndown chart burning up for most of an iteration as a complete failure), but the longer term benefits that can come from greater iteration planning and execution discipline can be very positive.