Milestone = an intermediate goal; Checkpoint = a point at which certain criteria are assessed or re-assessed.
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Milestone is typically associated with reaching a certain goal, before proceeding forward or stopping altogether. Checkpoint signifies points at which the team stops and checks progress against expectations, and possibly adjust.
Milestone (big granularity) means
progress checking at iterative way; it is important in overall project progress
and if associated goal is not fulfilled, some important analysis and decisions
are needed; it is associated with phases and iterations or other important
points and it could be related to formal progress tracking. As “no team is an island unto
itself”, that “software development” is not a hermetically sealed universe, and
that the software development efforts of one team are usually part of a bigger
coordinated undertaking / organization.
Checkpoint is a generic progress checking that could have a
big granularity (and then is a milestone) or could have a small granularity and
it is an “ordinary” checkpoints; the
“ordinary” checkpoints with small granularity are useful for intra-iteration
checks: be iterative inside an iteration; an “ordinary” checkpoints could be
related to formal or informal progress tracking. And a sum of “ordinary” checkpoints could
form a milestone.
Milestone = an intermediate goal. Milestones are usually shared or generally
visible join points between a development team and the funding organization /
program / project etc., and are usually an important shared concern across
customer stakeholders as well as the supply organization. Therefore, you can’t
unilaterally “disappear” them as agile teams milestones are often shared
outside the group - used in presentations, etc. Other projects or business
functions (ops, marketing, etc) might come to rely on the milestone date as a dependency.
Checkpoint = a point at which certain criteria
are assessed or re-assessed, so that a decision can be made about an initiative/project. Checkpoints are used internally to assess
the work to date, but may use their outcomes to help with traditional status
reporting. A checkpoint, is
what you have in agile at the end of each iteration or intra-iteration. You
check to see if you're on course what adjustments are required, and where to go
next. The term is in tune with the risk-driven, adaptive nature of agile
projects.
Milestone = planned features on your roadmap, it is calculated then promised to your customer in
the future from an analysis of your teams' velocity and feature's relative
complexity estimates.
Checkpoint = product and burn-down review at end of each sprint to give you indicators
of whether you are on track to meet these goals.
A real milestone is literally "cast in
stone”, but Agile milestone is adjustable. Associate the word "milestone" with a journey
where the route is known in advance. Reaching a planned milestone means that
you knew in advance that you were going to be in exactly that place at some
point on the journey. On agile projects, the timing of individual
timeboxes/sprints/stages may well be known in advance of the project, but their
content is probably not. Therefore the term, while not entirely inappropriate,
seems to conflict with the spirit of agile. For
example, in Agile, people define the "done" product by letting
whoever needs a project to experience working functionality; working
functionality is your checkpoint and milestone. In one of the Agile flavors, in
SCRUM, releases will indicate milestones, and iterations - checkpoints... SCRUM
pre-defines the iteration time line, but not the scope. Scope can change,
therefore, your milestones are flexible enough to adapt to changing business
needs. If you define milestone as accomplished necessary functionality, that is
very useful to business at the point in time - then you have them; if you
define milestone as something defined half -a -year ago, and then, it is not so
useful to business.
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It is important to
clarify the terms and make useful distinctions, or even better, fundamental
distinctions. Since people will use these common terms in different ways, all
you can do is be clear about your usage and message.
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