The defect tracking program Trac has a lovely Roadmap feature that shows progress toward a milestone. It's really great for giving project managers a high level overview of the current status. CVSTrac doesn't include this feature by default. In Ticket 449: Trac-like milestone report CPB lays out the basis to do this kind of feature in CVSTrac.

I took it to the last step and created cvstracprogress, a small program that given a milestone will generate the markup necessary to display a progress bar for a CVSTrac milestone. In Ticket 724 CPB even has a suggestion to create the full report. Take a look at the demo to see for yourself what it does.

For me the roadmap feature is one of the big things that separates Trac from CVSTrac. With this new progressbar the difference is gone. And since I like the performance and the other features of CVSTrac better than I like Trac, it's now a no-brainer for me to use CVSTrac. I'll implement CPB's suggested report and life in bug-tracking land will be good.

Notes on Use

The progress bar only works for certain interpretations of milestones. CVSTrac doesn't predefine that definition for you, and a perfectly valid interpretation of milestone is a point when something happened. For instance, when you tag a release in your CVS repository, that will automatically create a milestone. For that situation, there is no progress to track, because it isn't associated with tickets, and even if it was the tickets would be closed.

It works well for the event type milestone, when the milestone marks a goal that your project is shooting for. In the milestone comments just list the tickets that are related to this milestone, and this formatter will track the progress towards the milestone.