Linear has something velocity like: https://linear.app/docs/project-graph - I am not using it and I don't know how it compares to PT.
1. Tasks have points 2. Sprints have duration 3. Points accomplished per sprint is velocity 4. Use the average velocity of the past few sprints to pull some number of tasks off the top of the backlog. Those are the tasks for the next sprint.
It makes sprint planning basically transparent. I just prioritise the backlog (sometimes lazily) and it keeps me pretty productive. It's almost gamification in a way, but not quite.
You could use Linear’s cycles and milestones but you probably don’t need any of that structure if you’re just working ticket by ticket.
If a PM wants to see how adding in just one more feature impacts the schedule, they can just drag the pointed story into the queue and see what gets pushed out to the next week.
If a developer goes on vacation, it is easy to see how that impacts the schedule cause you can subtract their average velocity.
Most people don't understand this killer feature of PT unless they've actually spent a bunch of time using it. It really enables you to do accurate project estimates, if you do it right.
Source: worked for cloudfoundry/pivotallabs
I put in a very random guess as to the points value of each request - nothing more than "trivial, easy, difficult, bastard-bloody-hell-shit-buckets-difficult".
I had Tracker set to work in "weekly sprints" - but they're not really sprints at all - it's just a unit of measure. Internally it averages the number of points completed over the last three weeks, uses that for an average velocity, then moves the date markers on the "backlog" list to match.
Then, when a client asked when something will be done, I could pretty accurately say "unless something urgent crops up, it will be '18th-24th March'" (where "something urgent crops up" means I insert a story at the top of the queue instead of at the end).