What is a milestone? What are its goals and benefits? How does it work in Squash?
In this article, we introduce milestones along with their main features and their part in project management.
Milestones goals
Milestones allow to generate various versions of your test repository and to display only the objects (i.e. requirements, test cases, campaigns) associated to them.
Thanks to the milestones, you have now the possibility to manage the libraries by version, create a new version of your repository from an existing version, synchronize two versions, and much more!
For users under license, a dedicated documentation is available with further information to manage milestones and deal with the different functionalities (check our offers).
For all free-users of Squash TM, the main characteristics of milestones are available on our Wiki.
Milestone management
Prerequisite: Activation of the functionality.
The default settings disable milestones management. To enable the functionality, you need to go to the Administration workspace. To manage the milestones, you need to have access to the ‘Administration’ workspace. Thus, make sure you have an ‘Administrator’ or ‘Project leader’ profile. Both profiles give you access to the following actions:
Create, edit, delete milestones
Associate milestones to one or several projects
Clone and synchronize milesones
Users with Test Referee, Test Designer and Advanced Tester can only associate and deassociate milestones to requirements and test cases.
The association to milestones can be done through library and 'Milestones' tab of the requirement and/or test case to associate.
Milestone mode
To enable the Milestone mode, go to ‘My account’ page. With Milestone mode, only the associated objects to the selected milestone will appear in the library.
It is also possible to create a requirement, a test case or a campaign in Milestone mode. The object will be directly associated to the milestone.
Dashboard
With Milestone mode, you can generate dashboards in the different workspaces: requirement, test cases and campaigns workspaces. In each workspace, all the associated objects to the selected milestone are displayed in the dashboard. To display the dashboard under the Milestone mode, you need to click on [Milestone] button displayed above the library.
It is also possible to generate dashboard from a library selection (project, object, multiple selection...). Only associated object to the milestone and included in the selection will be displayed in the dashboards.
Additionnal information
Milestone scope
There is a milestone scope for each milestone. A milestone scope is the test repository associated to a milestone. The milestone scope depends on the user profile.
For an ‘Administrator’ profile, the milestone scope is defined as ‘Global’
For a ‘Project leader’ profile, the milestone scope is defined as ‘limited’. It means the repository is limited to the projects the project leader is responsible for.
Milestone status
The access to the functionalities introduced above depends on the user profile and the milestones’ status. The following table sums up the possible actions depending on the milestone status:
Cloning and synchronizing milestones
Cloning or synchronizing a milestone is only possible if the milestone status is "In progress" or "Finished".
Cloning = cloning a milestone allows to associate a new milestone to projects and/or requirements and/or test cases already associated to an existing milestone.
Synchronizing = synchronizing two milestones allows to associate one milestone’s objects to the other and reciprocally or not.