Is a Milestone issue type the best way to track program milestones in Jira?

Question

I recently set up a Jira project for tech infrastructure program with a 20 year old waterfall culture.  My supervisor made a random ask to add "milestone" issue type to the instance.  I believe the need is for identifying when the teams hit benchmarks, but they teams are also not used to providing customer updates in short agile cycles.

I'm a supporter of keeping things as simple as possible rather than unnecessarily complex processes.  The Jira project I created only uses the issue types Initiative, Epic, Story, Task, Bug, and Sub-Task.

Is a milestone issue type the best way to achieve this?

FWIW - I requested a goal and use case to properly establish his request, and am waiting on a response.

Olga Videc · Answer

Hello @Daniel Martin

Welcome to the community :)

How will you visualize your progress? How will you know if you are on time, you need to use metrics you can track.

Depending on your Jira plan you can use Roadmap or Advanced roadmap to visualize and track your progress. Jira doesn't have a milestone feature but you can use release dates, due dates, start/end dates or your custom date type field.

If you want to "mark" issues you can use labels or custom fields.

Do you use Confluence? Confluence offers helpful "out of the box" templates  for project tracking or you create your own what it offers is "Roadmap macro" on which you can have milestones check this https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/roadmap-planner-macro

BR, Olga

Florian Bonniec · Answer

Hi @Daniel Martin

It will depends what you ant to do with it, what is the information you want to attach to this issue type.

I usually use Version for that on my side. Milestone is not a process so it do not have a workflow so I would say that no, I only need a name and a date, it's why I use Version.

Regards