Introducing the new Milestone screen 📈

We are excited to unveil the latest version of the Milestone screen. We’ve made several improvements to make it easier than ever to track the progress of your key milestones such as a software releases or a customer deliveries. It helps you to predict how long it will take to complete the work based on the past velocity and the changes done to the scope.

Consider it a data driven way for tracking your team’s progress towards a goal!

What’s new?

• More flexible scope setting

• Quick menus for adjusting the date range and switching between the reports

• New Task Status report to show the tasks within the scope

• Team velocity setting (scope specific or full)

Read on to learn more about these improvements or start a free trial to give it a try with your own data.

More flexibility to the scope setting

Scope of the Milestone is now set using filters only. We’ve removed the scope menu from the settings and replaced it with a link to the filter window. By default the scope is all the tasks in the underlying boards that you’ve included as the sources for this screen, and you can use the filter feature to narrow it down to any subset of tasks. Simple yet powerful!

In the filter window, you can define your scope by filtering by any property e.g. label, epic, assignee etc. of your tasks. You can see all available properties for tasks and can filter by their values.

For example in Jira, you can pick one or more fixVersions to filter by releases. If you are a Trello user, you can install the free Scaled Power-Up which allows you to filter by Epic and Priority in addition to Assignee, Label and State.

Here’s an example of the filter window open with the Epic tab selected

Using the filter for the scope selection allows exploration with what-if scenarios. For example, you can see how how your forecasted delivery dates change when you select or unselect epics.

We’ve added quick menus

You may have already noticed the two quick menus on the top right corner:

You can use the right side menu to adjust the date range of the chart (by default, three months of history is shown). The menu on the left allows switching between the main views, the milestone burnup chart and the new task status report.

The new task status report shows the tasks within the set scope

So you’ve set the scope using the filter and got a nice burnup chart as a result. Wouldn’t it be nice to see what types of task that scope contains, or to which team members the remaining tasks are assigned to? Now you can see all that and much more in the task status report.

Selecting Task status from the quick menu shows a list of assignees along with a progress bar showing much they’ve completed of the tasks assigned to them. Since this list uses the same scope filter as the burnup chart, it’s really the same underlying data just represented in a different way!

You can now choose full velocity or scope specific velocity

You can now choose how your velocity is calculated. By default, the full velocity is assumed. That means that for the remaining scope, the team should dedicate the same amount of resources they’ve done in the past 10 weeks. That assumes there is no unplanned work expected which is not included in the scope.

If you expect work outside the planned scope, you can choose to use scope specific velocity instead. With that selection, your weekly velocity is based on how much work the team has completed in the past for the selected scope only. The forecasts are adjusted accordingly. The assumption is now that your team is likely to continue working on other projects than this, and no increase in velocity for this specific work scope is expected.

You can find more information about this chart, including a video tutorial, at the Tour page.