How to create a milestone

A milestone is a collection of issues (any combination of the above) that should be completed together. It may signal a relationship between issues that depend on each other, and/or correspond to a production release. Milestones define an achievable goal and help the team focus on completing it.

Milestones can be an excellent mechanism for queuing up future work or organizing the backlog while the team's focus is elsewhere so that when work toward a milestone begins, its list of issues has been carefully groomed and considered.

When you create a milestone:

1. Give it a short, pertinent name and be sure to include a description. If you're uncertain of how to write a good description or title, you can use the same user story template used for feature requests, and apply a broader scope.

2. Provide a due date. This helps the team focus and prioritize work for a particular milestone. Without a due date, scope creep is likely. Starting a milestone without a due date or with an incomplete list of issues introduces risk for the team.

3. Add issues to your milestone. Comb through the backlog to see if any issues already exist for this milestone, or create new issues to populate your milestone. Are any issues missing that should be accounted for? Does your due date need to be adjusted?