Milestone
A named target in a test management system, usually a release or a sprint, that groups the test runs belonging to it under a due date. The milestone is where progress against a deadline becomes visible: how much planned testing is done, what failed, and whether the remaining work fits the time left. Without one, release status gets rebuilt by hand from run names.
Also called: Release milestone
What a milestone answers
A test run answers one question: what happened when this set of cases ran against this build. A milestone answers a different one: are we on track for this release. It does that by grouping runs, and in many tools requirements too, under one target with a date. A regression run on Monday, an exploratory session on Wednesday and a retest of fixes on Friday are three runs. The milestone is what says they belong to the same release and adds them up.
Milestone, run and sprint are different things
Teams that plan in Jira sometimes skip milestones because the sprint seems to cover it. The sprint tracks development work; the milestone tracks the evidence that the work was tested. They often share a name and a date, which is fine. Merging them is the problem, because test progress then gets read from ticket statuses, and a ticket moved to Done says nothing about whether its tests passed.
The opposite mistake is one milestone per run. The grouping disappears and the roll-up shows nothing a run report would not.
What to put on one
A due date, the runs that count toward the release and, if the team keeps requirements traceability, the requirements in scope. The useful view of a milestone is short: how much of the planned execution is complete, the pass rate of what ran, the open bugs attached through defect linking, and how much is still owed against the days left. That last figure turns a milestone from a label into a forecast.
Closing it
Close or archive the milestone when the release ships. One left open keeps collecting runs from the next cycle, and its numbers stop describing anything.
In QAM Hub
Milestones are on every plan. Runs are grouped into a milestone, and the milestone page lists them with their roll-up status. On Standard and Advanced the project dashboard adds a burndown of the tests still owed with an On track, At risk or Overdue forecast. On Advanced, Release Readiness gives a milestone a single verdict against quality gates you configure. An archived milestone is closed for new work. See running tests and recording results.