What is a Milestone?
In a project management context, milestones serve as indicators for important moments, such as the project’s start or end dates, major reviews or approvals, or the completion of key deliverables. Essentially, a milestone serves as a reference point for marking significant achievements or key decision-making moments in a project’s development.
TestRail milestones make it simple to mark key project events, track progress, and align your team’s release goals with corresponding testing efforts.
Gaining testing visibility
In TestRail, you can define as many milestones as needed, for both current and future dates enabling you to keep your work organized and on track. Milestones can define anything important in your project, like a planned software release or an internal test version.
Once you add, define and configure your milestones, you can link test runs or test plans to it, making it easier to track progress and results using the dashboard or reports.
Whether you're monitoring upcoming tasks or analysing completed work, TestRail Milestones help you stay organized and maintain oversight of key project components.
Implementation and design
TestRail Milestones are easy to create and manage, and you can either do it directly in the instance or through the TestRail API.
In this article, we will walk you through the process of creating and managing Milestones directly within TestRail, helping you adopt and utilize the tool more effectively. You will find useful tips and recommendations on how to configure milestones to get the most out of them. By the end of this article, you'll be equipped to manage milestones with ease and efficiency.
Milestone creation
Creating a new Milestone is straightforward and intuitive. The only required field is the Name; all other fields are optional and can be filled out as needed. For instance, you may not have the start and end dates available when initially creating the milestone, or you might need to update its Reference later.
References for requirements integrations are particularly useful if you want to link a Milestone to other work items in a Project Management Tools, such as Jira. This integration allows you to easily map and track work associated with external tools alongside your testing and quality efforts.
In short, all fields are editable at any time. However, if you change the start date after the milestone status is set to "Open" and progress has been made (e.g., test results), the milestone will return to "Upcoming" status. You’ll need to reset the "Start" date to update it back to "Open," and any forecast data will be lost.
To set a milestone to "Open," you can do so in two ways:
- directly from the Milestones board
- inside the milestone page details
The action of starting a milestone will trigger the action to update automatically all the Test Runs and/or Test Plans assigned status from Upcoming to Active.
Milestone completion
Upon completion of the milestone, you may close it to organize your Milestones page. To do so, open the edit page for the completed milestone, and at the bottom of the configuration page, you will find an option to mark it as complete. Once this change is saved, it cannot be reversed. This will be the final step of the milestone. The milestone will remain on your Milestones page but will be moved to the "Completed" section. You will retain access to all information related to that milestone.
Note: Since a closed milestone cannot be reopened, the best approach to repeat the work is to create a new milestone.
Deleting a milestone
It’s always possible to delete milestones, you can have several reasons to do that, so TestRail lets you manage your work in a way that best fits your needs.
You can delete milestones independently of its status - Upcoming, Open or Closed. Take as important note that once you delete it, all the data will be lost, all the linkages will be removed and you cannot get that information back again.
So be sure about this decision if you need to take it. Test Runs, Test Plans and all the data related won't be lost. It will remain in the “Test Run and Results” tab, but unassigned.
Maximize visibility and reporting
When it comes to align with the information about a milestone, there’s several things you can look after. TestRail Milestones offers you plenty of information that you can get on-the-fly just by looking at dashboards. You can get along with the general status, the related activities updates, and also be informed about the progress of the Milestone. It’s really easy to outpour that information.
By opening the Milestone Details Page that you want to get information from (independent of its status - Upcoming, Open, Close) you can find, at the right side of the page, four links namely Status, Activity, Progress and Defects.
We’ll look into each individually and explain how you can best use each.
Status
When accessing this area, you can immediately have a visual feedback of how everything is going. There's valuable information available which can undoubtedly help you to get the data you need.
The visual progress in this page is not only for the milestone (and from its child, if it exists) but also individually from the Test Runs and/or Test Plans assigned.
Starting to look with more attention to each part of the page, we’ll start by the dashboard, where all the data from the current progress of the milestone test, specific or from child branches. All it’s presented here. You can even get into detail of which tests have passed or are blocked by clicking on the slices from the circular graph.
In case you need to extract data, it’s possible to export it in XML, CSV or Excel file format and it’s also possible to print an Outline or Detailed version of it.
If the Milestone status is Open or Upcoming, from here you can do two things: add a child milestone or, if the milestone it’s not started yet, change its status. Each option can be accessed at the buttons presented on the right side of this page.
In case you want to get more detailed information, it’s possible to dive into each Child milestone, Test Run or Test Plan details page, just by clicking on its link.
It's also simple and quick to get your reports from this page, as there’s a button on the top of the dashboard that works like a shortcut.
Activity
When it comes to related milestone activities, you can get the detailed information from the past 14 days (independently of when you’ve started the milestone) and you’ll be able to check, in list format, all the activities that happened during the last days.
All the Test Cases are listed individually (independently if they’re assigned to any Child Milestone, Test Run or Test Plan) with its status to each day. Also possible to know who’s the person who did changed
The chart presented in the dashboard area can also be downloaded as an image or a CSV file, so you can use it in other reports or documents/emails that will have value from it.
Progress
This is likely the most crucial section in your TestRail Milestones area.
In this section, you can access not only the overall progress of the milestone but also various forecasts and predictions, which are highly valuable when considering the goals and objectives of a Milestone.
While you cannot customize the information displayed here, the data presented has been curated based on customer feedback.
Having an estimate of how long specific tests will take to complete and understanding the potential impact of bug fixes on the schedule are crucial. With TestRail Milestones, all of this information is readily available and easy to access.
Furthermore, all the data presented is highly accurate and updated daily, without requiring any manual action from our users.
It’s important to note that this information is based on the date and time when the Milestone status was set to "Open," not the start date entered on the configuration page, which is merely a prediction. The actual start date is when you click "Start."
The chart displayed in the dashboard area can also be downloaded as an image or a CSV file, allowing you to incorporate it into other reports, documents, or emails where it may add value.
Defects
Finally, there's the Defect section, where you can access all the information related to defects opened during the duration of the milestone.
For those involved in the execution or management of the Test Process, having this type of visualization is crucial to keeping everything on track. While this section focuses on defects, it's important to understand their impact on the overall process. Simply having a large number of open bugs, without detailed information, doesn’t provide meaningful insight into the work completed or the progress of the Milestone. It’s essential to know not only how many defects are open but also what percentage they represent of the total tests executed and the results collected.
Additionally, to identify the most problematic Test Runs and/or Test Plans, you can easily see how many defects are associated with each item assigned to the Milestone.
To facilitate the mapping of information between TestRail and your project management tool integration (like Jira), there’s a list of all defects reported, with its external ID and also its status.
By clicking on the defect title, you’ll be automatically redirected to its external page in your Project Management Tool. The defect status is also updated automatically whenever it is modified in the external tool, ensuring that its progress is always visible and trackable.
The chart presented in the dashboard area can also be downloaded as an image or a CSV file, so you can use it in other reports or documents/emails that will have value from it.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, TestRail Milestones can be an invaluable tool for your management efforts. The data collected and displayed in the dashboards is extremely valuable, helping you stay on top of everything. It allows you to foresee potential issues, better organize your work, align all milestones, and be well-prepared for a successful project release.
With the wealth of information at your disposal, you can easily incorporate it into your daily tasks or quickly share it with anyone who needs it, giving you greater confidence and assurance.