Remove specification milestone duration (timeline starts)

[vikasrohit]

Remove specification milestone duration (timeline starts). When we have a timeline start most of the time we don't want to set a timeline for the customer to complete a specification. The goal is to flip the switch once the specification is ready and the copilot can start the challenges on the platform. We already made the specification document optional, so let's remove further constraints from the system and make sure that the first checkpoint is the agreement on specification, which would record the start of work and transition into the next milestone in the timeline.

from #2301

Aha! Link: https://topcoder.aha.io/features/TCCONNECT-378

[vikasrohit]

@vic-topcoder I didn't understand this requirement. Specification milestone (named as timelines starts in most of the phases except the dev iterations where as per requirements we are treating it as kind of development work) is never intended for customer to upload specification. Rather it is the preparatory work at our end which is mostly done by copilots. So, I don't understand the need of getting rid of its duration.
If you just want to have a dummy milestone to mark the start of timeline, we need to add that in every phase timeline. But that would make things slightly more complicated because right now our logic activates the first milestones when phase is marked as active, while with this dummy milestone we have to mark the first one as complete and next one as active. This change would again require regression testing and some dirty checks in the code to support backward compatibility with all existing timelines where we don't have such dummy start milestone.

[vic-georgiev]

I'll defer the decision to @acshields; I'm fine if the specification milestone has a duration.

[acshields]

I am a fan of keeping things simple - Let's keep the specification milestone with a duration. If there is a duration that is used today, then let's keep that in place. If not, make the default duration 2 days.

[vikasrohit]

Yes, it has duration of 2 days and that is completely configurable via data entry without any code change.

[vikasrohit]

Closing