Sprints and milestones
Two ways to bound work that are not interchangeable — and using the wrong one makes your reports lie.
They are not the same thing
| Sprint | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|
| Bounded by | Time | Outcome |
| Ends when | The dates run out | The thing ships |
| Unfinished work | Rolls to the next sprint | Stays in the milestone |
| Measured by | Velocity, burndown | Completion |
A sprint is "the next two weeks". A milestone is "version 2.0". A task can be in both at once, and usually is.
Using milestones as sprints — a new "milestone" every fortnight — makes velocity and burndown meaningless, because both assume the boundary is a fixed window. The charts will render; they just will not mean anything.
Sprints
Project → Sprints → New sprint. Give it dates and a name.
Then plan: move tasks in from the backlog until the sprint holds about as much as the team finished last time. That number is your velocity, and it is the only honest input to how much to commit to.
Starting a sprint sets the burndown baseline. Closing one asks what to do with unfinished work — move it to the next sprint or return it to the backlog.
Burndown
Remaining work against time. What to read from it:
- A line tracking the diagonal means the sprint is on course.
- A flat start is the most common shape and usually means work was started in parallel rather than finished in sequence.
- A step up mid-sprint means scope was added after commitment.
Milestones
Project → Milestones. A milestone has a target date and holds the tasks that must be done for it.
Unfinished work does not roll anywhere when the date passes — the milestone is simply late, which is the information you wanted. Moving the date is a decision somebody makes, not something that happens automatically.
Using both
The common arrangement: milestones describe what you are shipping, sprints describe the fortnight you are in. A task belongs to one of each.
Sprint reports answer "is this iteration going to plan". Milestone reports answer "is the release going to happen". Different questions, and a team that only tracks one of them usually finds out about the other too late.