Milestones

.-----------------  Milestone 1 ------------------.
[   v0.1   ] [   v0.2   ] [   v0.3   ] [   v1.0   ] [ ....      ]
^            ^            ^            ^
Jan 2        Jan 16       Jan 30       Feb 13

A milestone is a group of sprints that work toward a common goal. Before a milestone begins, the team must decide on things in this list:

• Mission - a goal that this milestone release is meant to achieve.
• Required features - features that must be in the final version.
• Optional features - nice-to-have features that may be culled if time is short.
• Projection - an estimate of how many sprints are needed to accomplish this milestone.

Sample milestone

For most projects, the first milestone is the minimum viable product, or the MVP. The specifics for Milestone 1 should be decided on in the project's planning phase. Here's an example milestone plan:

Milestone plan example

Mission

Build a blog platform with the bare-minimum features to be used on George's blog.

Required features

• Article writing and publishing
• Blog view (list and view articles)
• Support for images
• Simple commenting support

Optional features

• Multi-user login
• Spam detection

Tentative projection

• Sprint v0.1: Basic framework, UI
• Sprint v0.2: Basic feature implementation
• Sprint v0.3: Support for Amazon S3, RSS, responsive fixes

Next: Kick off development work with sprint zero.