Make milestones and versions more meaningful (BB-13737)

Bitbucket supports such features as milestones and versions, but essentially those are just labels/tags just like components as you can do little with them. That would be nice if milestones and versions could reflect their actual terms.

I could see a version having at least two states:

• Active / In Progress
• Released

and milestones having different states as well:

• Active / In Progress
• Reached
• Missed / Delayed

A milestone's state could be even provided automatically if there was a connection between them and actual dates. I don't really know how other people use milestones, but I myself typically name them like "2015-10-15" and consider it as a milestone's deadline.

Another thing is that there is no need in two such entities. You can think about a milestone as a date of a release. Therefore, that would be enough if there was such a thing as version (release) and a specific date assigned to it. A version is not necessarily a production release that you deliver, say, once a quarter, but could be any internal release as well.

The problems that currently exist with milestones and versions how they are implemented in Bitbucket:

• They are basically tags and nothing else
• They are directly connected in real life, but there is no way to make that connection between them in Bitbucket
• If you treat them as actual versions and milestones, you have to do a lot of manual work and can introduce inconsistency in your issue tracker as you can easily assign a version and a milestone to an issue which are disconnected and not supposed to come along

That would be enough to have the only entity in fact: Version (or Release), and make it able to assign some due date to it. And considering that date, Bitbucket could automatically show the current status of that version.

PS I understand that you are trying to keep Bitbucket as simple as possible, and make customers to eventually migrate to Jira when Bitbucket functionality becomes insufficient might also be a final goal. However, to be fair, this particular issue brings sort of inconsistency to the system and probably even makes the user experience worse. Also, I personally would prefer paying to Bitbucket if I needed to introduce more than 5 users for a project instead of paying for Jira because Bitcucket's UI is still neat whereas Jira is incredibly overwhelming to me. Please just consider these points as well.