What’s a release? For us at Tracker it’s a marker in your backlog that represents the most important milestones. As you can see in the screencast, creating a release marker is just like making a story.

It’s that mysterious one on the end.

In a conversation with Joanne, she mentioned (in a delightful British accent), “The most key point of all is that the release marker should follow the stories planned for that milestone.” Here at Tracker we also use release markers, like bookmarks, to help organize the Icebox–for example: blocked or upcoming features.

Note: The Releases panel only shows scheduled releases – so no releases in the Icebox. To see all releases use this in the Search box type:Release.

Marlena thoroughly covered releases in the Agile Continuum, it would be hard to top her blogging prowess so here’s an excerpt:

While XP and Agile brought us out of the dark ages of big-bang releases in favor of smaller, more frequent releases, there are now varying flavors of frequent releases. In XP and Scrum, releases are typically associated with the end of an iteration, but they don’t necessarily have to be. On the Tracker team, we focus on flexibility within an iteration. This is part of the logic behind Tracker’s release markers. The release markers have a date, but that date does not have to coincide with the end of an iteration, neither is the marker tied to a certain set of stories. We have Epics for that. You can read more about both Epics and Releases here.

Learn more about releases here.