Are Milestones the best way to handle project release numbers?

avatar Tracy Floyd Pro Aug 15. 2010. 8:19 pm #1
New user here, but so far activeCollab seems awesome! But, I have a question about Milestones:

Often times we'll have a ticket for a feature that we need to push to the next version of a project... but we don't always have a target date for when the next version will be released... (sometimes its just launched when its ready) - but Milestones require a date be set before they are created. This is forcing me to just enter arbitrary dates in the future so I can setup my Milestones... which is going to mean I'll likely have lots of "overdue" dates to juggle, reset, etc. in the near future... is there a better way to do this - or a better way to organize things around release numbers that isn't tied to dates?
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Aug 16. 2010. 2:42 am #2
Hello,

Milestones require date to be set in order to be created, so you'll need to set them.

What we usually do is create milestones for future releases and allocate time blocks for them (3 months, 6 months etc depending on the milestone) and than simply reschedule whole sets of milestones when we know due date for the next release (reschedule feature allows you to automatically reschedule successive milestones).
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avatar Tracy Floyd Pro Aug 16. 2010. 10:36 am #3
Alright thanks. Maybe this is good... it'll keep us thinking about release dates and force us to draw some lines in the sand :-)
avatar willemn Dev Aug 20. 2010. 5:21 am #4
We do the same and it actually helped us become more effective in staying on top of our release cycles.

We brought our iterations from 2.5 months dow to 4-5 weeks. Since then our pushes to nightly, testing and weekly as well as demo sites are more in rhythm and everything has become much more manageable.

We have 2 milestones for each release:
Iteration X features
Iteration X testing

If features do not make it into the release, we drag them into the next milestone/Iteration.
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