Cycles
Cycles are a practice to keep up your team's momentum, similar to commonly used agile flavored sprints.
Overview
Cycles are time-boxed periods where a team works on completing a pre-defined set of work. When enabled, Linear automatically creates upcoming cycles for your team. Unlike sprints, cycles are not tied to releases.
Configure
Configure cycles under Workspace Settings > Teams > Select team > Cycles. Turn on the toggle for Enable cycles. You'll need to decide about how your team will work in order to set them up. Required settings will show up in the cycle setting flow with defaults. You can always edit cycle configurations in the future.
Cycle settings
Cycle duration
In the Each cycle lasts field, select the number of weeks you want each cycle to last. Cycles can last anywhere from 1-8 weeks, with one or two weeks being the most common intervals. It is not possible to create cycles with different durations or to start or end on specific dates. The goal of cycles having repeated intervals is to help you avoid the busywork associated with optimizing cycle timing and instead focus on shipping.
Cooldowns after each cycle
Including a cooldown period after each cycle to give your team a break and bandwidth to work through technical debt and other planning functions. Issues cannot be assigned to a cooldown.
Starting day of the week
Since cycles occur in regular intervals, you'll choose a specific day of the week for your cycles to start. Cycles begin at 12:01 AM on the chosen day (based on the timezone configured in Settings > Team > General).
Upcoming cycles
Select the number of upcoming cycles to create for your team. Members will only be able to add issues to cycles that have been created.
Disable cycles
When disabling the Cycles feature, the current cycle will be marked as completed and upcoming cycles will be removed. Any completed cycle data will be preserved for reference. You can choose to reenable cycles at any stage in the future.
Cycle automations
Issues rollover
Cycles run on an automated schedule to reduce unnecessary date math and help create routine. Any unfinished work rolls over to the next cycle automatically. There is no way to keep unfinished issues in a closed cycle. If you forget to update an issue before the cycle ends, completed issues can still be moved over to the previous cycle.
Auto-add active issues
Auto-adding issues to a cycle helps to ensure all your work is captured by cycles. Within a Team's cycle settings, you have the option to auto-add any Started issues or Completed issues that do not have a cycle assigned into the current cycle. If the current cycle is in cooldown, the issues will be added to the following cycle.
Require cycles
Toggle on the option for Active issues are required to belong to a cycle setting to ensure all active issues get added to a cycle. An option will appear allowing you to move existing active issues that isn't assigned to a cycle to Move to Backlog (change it's status) or Keep in Active (put it into the current or next cycle, depending on cooldown settings). Once enabled, any issue that gets moved to a started status will be automatically added to a cycle. An active status is a status in the "Unstarted" and "Started" category.
Cycle planning
Cycles are similar to sprints and group work by time. Create healthy routine and focus teams on what work should happen next. Set cycles to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 weeks long. Press G then C to see all cycles and go to the current cycle with G the V.
Set automations to move issues in and out of cycles automatically based on their status.
- What are cycles and how they work [0:00]
- ProTip: How to use cycle statistics [0:19]
- How to read a cycle graph [0:36]
- Current cycle view and sidebar [1:22]
- ProTip: How to use the sidebar during meetings to filter and update issues [1:28]
- How to configure cycles in team settings [2:14]
- How cycles start, end and turnover issues [2:40]
- Cooldowns [3:08]
- Example: How we use cooldowns [3:14]
- How to change number of planned cycles [3:24]
- ProTip: Why you would set more planned cycles [3:39]
- Configuration options that automate moving issues in/out of cycles [4:01]
Cycle calendars
Keep up with your Linear cycles in your preferred calendar application by visiting your team's Cycles page, click on the overflow menu on a cycle, and hover over Subscribe to cycle calendar. Choose to add to Google Calendar, copy a feed URL, or download the calendar as an .ics file.
Cycle capacity
On the Cycles view, cycles that have not yet started will display 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.