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

There are other tools but my favourite is something like Gitlab/Github's 'issues'. It's simple. You can add custom project tags (e.g. 'minor bug'), link it to other issues, comment, assign it to someone, etc. Gitlab itself pitches it that way:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/

What I do is to generally avoid things that require others to learn a lot. Let's face it, most people won't be bothered and not to mention their time is best spent elsewhere. Gitlab and Github are essentially just a small step from Git, which makes it straightforward.

I have seen managers who were too eager and made their process unnecessarily complex. And I have seen managers who didn't give a rat's arse. Both sucked to work for about as much. Be careful with going the extra mile because upper management might think it good but us programming plebs might not. I hope you find a good balance.

[–] firelizzard 1 points 2 years ago

We are already using GitLab