The Fake Burndown Ruler ™

Order the Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ TODAY! With this brand new innovative plastic ruler you can now help your team create awesome Sprint Burndowns. Every day! Every sprint!

It’s fast, it’s cheap and as a bonus you get rid of some “waste”. The Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ makes the daily estimation of remaining work unnecessary.

The Scrum Master no longer needs to do the painstaking exercise of manually adding up the hours on all the post-its. Simply hold up the ruler on your chart and draw you burndown! It’s that simple! If you are lucky, the Daily Scrum is over in less than 90 seconds.

The Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ will make your day as a Scrum Master feel like a summer breeze. No more ugly burndowns that concern stakeholders (i.e. no more depressing “what should we scope out” meetings). Also, the sprint burndown will always be close to the “ideal line” (but not too close to raise suspicion) which reduces the stress in the team.

The default ruler is customized for the standard 20 day (four week) sprint. With the aid of the ruler it’s easy to continue the same line tomorrow. However, some teams rebel and try their own sprint lengths. That’s why the Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ comes in several versions:

  • 20 Days (Standard, 1 month)
  • 15 Days (3 weeks) *
  • 10 Days (2 weeks)
  • 5 Days (1 weeks)**
  • 60 Days (3 months)
  • 120 Days (6 months)***

* NEW! For some reason some regard this as the “new” standard 
** The 5 days sprint ruler is a straight ruler (such a short sprint is absurd anyway)
*** The 120 days sprint ruler has room for adding milestone (only permanent markers will stick to the ruler)

And finally, a tip from the Evil Coach – for FREE:
If someone gets suspicious that the burndown looks the same way every sprint, simply turn the ruler upside down the next sprint.

/Evil Coach

6 responses on “The Fake Burndown Ruler ™

  1. It can also be used to smack late arrivals at the daily standup.

    Thank you Evil Coach! 🙂

  2. Here is a suggestion for a premium version of the ruler. Instead of making it out of hard plastic, make it out of flexible rubber and filled with gel. In this way, the user can compress the top edge of the ruler as necessary to change the shape of the burn down line, thus avoiding leadership suspicion!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.