Wouldn't a more sophisticated UI presentation of sub-issues kindof solve this?

And if you think of agile development, the first three milestones you listed are basically in an endless loop, and the forth does not really exist. And, well, for complex projects, going agile makes all the sense in the world :)

Niels:

I don't use phases with my development but I do have deadlines. I've been using Versions as deadlines but they aren't really suited for that.

What I was thinking (based on some ideas Shane Pearlman and Peter Chester had) was to have another object called Milestones. These would have a name, start date, and end date (possibly an assignment for who is responsible). Then both the Gantt and Calendar modules would be modified to show Milestones:

• a time range on the Gantt (in ascii: ----==========----)
• the start and end dates listed on the Calendar

I don't need much else for my purposes but I think this could be extended as needed (e.g. notifications of upcoming milestones, ical feeds, filtering issues by milestone dates).

P.S. I think this could be done in a plugin with some modifications to the core.

Eric Davis

Other possible approach would be support some sort of hierarchy for versions: so one version could have one or more subversions and each subversion could be a milestone, a sprint or anything else that would help you to manage your project.

Having only two nesting levels for versions doesn't seem to be too complex and could be very handy.

Eric Davis wrote:

I don't use phases with my development but I do have deadlines. I've been using Versions as deadlines but they aren't really suited for that.

I've been working around the same problem for a while now too. In fact, I've renamed "Versions" to "Milestones" in our installation, because we do a lot more stuff than SW development and use Chiliproject to track that work. And people not coming from software development get confused by "versions".

But as you say, it's not very suited for that. I also don't like to tap into subtasks for that because issues mostly appear in a "flat" list in the tables and it gets quite messy very quickly.

What I was thinking (based on some ideas Shane Pearlman and Peter Chester had) was to have another object called Milestones. These would have a name, start date, and end date (possibly an assignment for who is responsible). Then both the Gantt and Calendar modules would be modified to show Milestones:

• a time range on the Gantt (in ascii: ----==========----)
• the start and end dates listed on the Calendar

Milestones, as far as I understand them, should just have one date, shouldn't they? Much like the versions now. But I gotta say that I don't particularly fancy the idea of having a separate "Milestone" and "Version" field. I think it will just add confusion and complexity. But it might just be my requirement for non-software development...

I don't need much else for my purposes but I think this could be extended as needed (e.g. notifications of upcoming milestones, ical feeds, filtering issues by milestone dates).
P.S. I think this could be done in a plugin with some modifications to the core.

I was wondering about that. Right now there is no easy way (I know of) that I can pull a list of versions (cross project) via the API. I can pull all issues and then filter by version etc. But I cannot get the due date of a version as far as I know.

Do you know a workaround for that? If I could pull/filter by milestone dates somewhere, it would be super-useful.

Suggestion: why not add the version date to the API output as in

fixed_version: {
   name: "My version" 
   id: 260
   version_effective_date: 2011/06/20
}

Or is there any way that I can pull the version_id related info via the API?

Cheers,
Jan