Many of us work in environments where the question “when will you be done with X?” matters. Some of the examples I have seen recently are: The business team wants a certain set of functional enhancements as well as performance & scalability improvements. Can we get both done? Will one need to take a back seat to the other? A customer has a “deployment window” that we want to hit with a certain set of functionality. Do we look like we will make it? If not, what adjustments might we make? A customer wants an early warning if the cost of a project is likely to go over a certain amount. One of the tools we have in our repertoire for answering these kinds of questions is the humble build-up chart. In its simplest form, the build-up chart looks something like this: The target scope (of which we are asking the question: when will it be done?) is represented by a target line, in this case, just below 150 points. The progress so far, and anticipated progress, are represented by a line repre