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How do you organize miscellaneous tasks? (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 2 years ago by firelizzard to c/experienced_devs

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I am an experienced developer, but not an experienced manager. I'd prefer if organizing tasks was not my responsibility, but I work at a small company and no one else is inclined to do it. How do you organize miscellaneous tasks when using a task management system such as Jira? We're using GitLab, but it has the same basic features, such as epics, milestones, tasks, and subtasks.

I don't want to have miscellaneous tasks floating around in the ether, because things like that tend to get lost. But an epic is supposed to have a well-defined end goal, right? A good epic is something like "Implement this complex feature" or "Reach this level of maturity" - not "Miscellaneous stuff".

The majority of the work we do fits fairly clearly into specific goals, such as "Release the next version of feature." But what about bug fixes and other random improvements and miscellaneous tasks? How do you keep those organized?

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[–] firelizzard 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'd say the biggest categories are chores and minor updates. For example (for the latter category), we finished an overhaul of the API; we developed and tested it, then deployed it to the test environment and had users and app developers test it, then we deployed it to production and closed the epic. And now that it's on production and more people are using it, we've realized it needs some improvements. Where do those tasks belong? They're not high enough priority to do now (there are other things higher on the list), but they should get done eventually, and there's not enough of them to merit an epic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

New epic called " v2" 😅

[–] valence_engineer 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

and there’s not enough of them to merit an epic.

Why? Other than having more backlog Jira epics in the UI this seems the best approach? Put them into an Epic and once the Epic is large enough you prioritize work on it. If it never gets to that size then you can re-evaluate.