Cycles

A cycle is a sprint: a start date, an end date, and the work you intend to finish in between. It's the answer to "what are we doing this fortnight", and it's where burn-down charts come from.

Cycles are switched on per project (Project settings → Features → Cycles). If you don't see Cycles in a project's sidebar, that's why.

What you can do

Create a cycle with a name and a date range.
Add work items to it — new ones, or existing ones from the backlog.
Watch progress on a burn-down or burn-up chart as the cycle runs.
Break progress down by assignee, label or state.
Transfer unfinished work to the next cycle when this one ends.
Archive finished cycles to keep the list clean.

Getting started

Create a cycle

Open a project and click Cycles in the sidebar (shortcut G C).
Click Add cycle — or press N then C from anywhere in the project.
Give it a name ("Sprint 12", or the dates), an optional description, and a start date and end date.
Create it.

Dates can't start in the past. Name your cycles consistently — you'll be reading the list for a long time.

📷 Screenshot: the create-cycle dialog with a title and the start/end date range picker open.

A cycle's status is its dates

You don't "start" or "stop" a cycle by hand. Its status follows the calendar:

Status	Means
Draft	No dates set yet. A shell you can fill later.
Yet to start	Dates set, start date is in the future.
In progress	Today is inside the date range. This is the project's active cycle.
Completed	The end date has passed.

The Cycles page lists the active cycle first, then upcoming cycles, then completed ones.

Adding work items

Open the cycle. If it's empty you'll be offered two paths:

Create a work item directly inside the cycle — it's created in the project and added to the cycle in one step.
Add existing work items — a search dialog over the project's items. Select several at once and add them all.

Once the cycle has work in it, the cycle page behaves like any other work-item page: switch layouts, filter, group, drag cards between states. See Views & layouts.

You can also set an item's cycle from its own properties sidebar, or drag it onto a cycle when a board is grouped by cycle.

To take something out, use Remove from cycle on the item's context menu.

Tracking progress

Open a cycle and look at the sidebar panel. It gives you:

A progress chart — toggle between Burn-down (work remaining falling towards zero) and Burn-up (work completed climbing towards scope). Burn-down answers "will we finish?"; burn-up makes scope creep visible.
Progress statistics — the same completion figures broken down by assignee, by label and by state. Use the assignee breakdown in stand-up; use the label breakdown to see how much of the sprint went to tech-debt.

Progress is counted by state group, not by state name. Anything in a completed state counts as done. If your custom states are in the wrong groups, your charts will lie — see Projects → States.

📷 Screenshot: a cycle's progress sidebar with the burn-down chart and the assignee breakdown below it.

The Active Cycles page in the workspace sidebar shows the current cycle of every project at once — useful if you run several teams.

Completing a cycle

A cycle completes itself when its end date passes. Two things follow.

Completed cycles are locked. You can't add work to a completed cycle or edit what's in it. The cycle is a record of what happened, and it stays that way.

Unfinished work needs somewhere to go. Open the completed cycle and, if it still contains incomplete items, you'll see a Transfer work items button. Click it, pick a cycle that hasn't completed yet, and every incomplete item moves across. Items already in a completed or cancelled state stay behind, where they belong.

📷 Screenshot: a completed cycle showing the "Completed cycles are not editable" notice and the Transfer work items button.

Do the transfer at the start of your next planning session, not the end of the last one. What didn't finish is the first thing you should be discussing.

Archiving

Completed cycles can be archived from the cycle's context menu. They move to the project's Archives → Cycles and stop cluttering the list. Nothing is lost; you can restore them.

Tips

Keep cycles short and the same length. Two weeks, always two weeks. The charts only become useful once you can compare one cycle to the last.
Name cycles by number, not by theme. "Sprint 12" ages better than "Checkout push", and the theme belongs in a module anyway.
Cycles answer when, modules answer what. A healthy sprint pulls work from several modules. If your cycle and your module contain the same items, you only need one of them.
If you plan ahead, create the next two or three cycles as drafts and drop work into them as it's triaged.

Limits & good to know

One active cycle per project. Cycles don't overlap. Parallel streams of work are what Modules are for.
A work item can be in only one cycle at a time.
Completed cycles are read-only. No adding, no editing. The only action left is transferring the incomplete items out.
Transfer only offers cycles that haven't completed.
Cycles are per-project. There's no cross-project cycle; to see them all at once use the Active Cycles page.
Progress is driven by state groups. Custom states in the wrong group will quietly break your burn-down.

Core concepts
Modules — the what to a cycle's when.
Work items
Projects — turning Cycles on, and getting state groups right.