Cycles

Cycles are a practice to keep up your team's momentum, similar to commonly used agile flavored sprints.

Overview

The purpose of a cycle is to focus the team’s priorities during a set period of time. Unlike sprints, cycles are not tied to releases.

Configure

Beside each team in your Linear sidebar, you can click on the ... icon to then navigate to the team settings. From here, you can navigate to the team's cycle settings to configure cycles and customize the timing and automations. You'll have to set them up for each team.

Basics

View cycles

See a list of all cycles for your team under the Cycles view in the sidebar. Open the list of cycles with G then C, active cycle with G then V, upcoming cycle with G then W, or a menu of all current and future cycles for your team with O then C.

Assign issues to cycles

Add issues to a cycle from the issue editor or from any board or list view. Select the issue, then use keyboard shortcut Shift C to assign issues to a cycle or save a step with Cmd/Ctrl Shift C to assign it to the active cycle. Use backlog and project views make it easy to find priority issues when cycle planning. Completed issues can be moved to the last completed cycle if necessary, but not to older cycles.

Issue peek

Use Issue Peek to view issue description and details without having to leave the cycles list view.

Sidebar and graph

Bring up the cycle details sidebar using Cmd/Ctrl I while viewing any individual cycle. You can read more about the cycle graph in our documentation here.

Cycle description

Add a description to cycles to clarify your team's focus during that cycle. Click on the cycle name, select Edit, and then add the Description in the text field under the name.

Cycle capacity

For cycles that have not yet started, you'll see a capacity dial that shows an estimate on whether your team will be likely to complete all the issues added to the cycle.

Capacity is calculated from the velocity of the previous three completed cycles, i.e. the number of issues or estimate points completed in these cycles. If the team has not completed any cycles previously, capacity will be roughly estimated from the number of members in the team.

Cycle calendars

Keep up with your Linear cycles in your preferred calendar application by visiting your team's cycle page, clicking on the overflow menu on a cycle and choosing Subscribe to cycle calendar. Choose to add to Google Calendar, copy a feed URL or download the calendar as an .ics file.

FAQ