How to set up milestones in Jira

Question

I'm being asked by management to find a better way of reporting on the successes of the team over each quarter - how much of what we commit to that we achieve and so on.

My manager suggested using milestones, which can be used across multiple projects to mark the work scheduled for the quarter.

We are working in weekly sprints and also have weekly releases. We use epics for defined features. The milestones need to be attached to tickets across multiple projects.

In order to get good reports out of Jira, is there a good way of grouping tickets across projects where I can set deadlines?

Danut M _StonikByte_ · Answer

Hi @Elspeth Hinde,

Try the Release Burnup Burndown Chart offered by our Great Gadgets app. It allows you to display  milestones for the release in the burndown/burnup chart. A past milestone will be displayed in red color, if the Remaining work at that time was higher than Ideal, or in green color if it was lower, thus indicating if the milestone was reached or not.

For any questions or suggestions, contact support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut

Jack Brickey · Answer

agree, everyone views things differently. For example, IMO, milestones is not a good measure of word done. It is a measure of reaching a goal. Work done might be features done vs. committed for a given category/weighting. For example the team may have the following goals for the quarter:

5 - High priority features (stories, epic, etc)

6 - Medium priority features

3- Low priority features

At the end of the quarter the result might be:

3/5, 2/6, 2/3

Now even better, again IMO, would be the use of Story Points. Once an agile team hits some consistency of assessing SPs then you can measure the number of SPs per quarter and trend this over time to see if the team is increasing their velocity/ouput.

Elspeth Hinde · Answer

Thanks for this, I think you're right. I'm going to have that conversation and work from there.