this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Depends on what you mean by miscellaneous.
Are we talking about things my team calls "chores"? Things like upgrade some dependencies, or fix something annoying about the DX or build, look into that new library the team's been talking about maybe using to replace some jank part of the app?
If so, we have an epic we simply name "chores". We stack the backlog of chores based on priority and we attempt to get at least one done a sprint.
It's not critical stuff. It's not blocking anything (yet). It's just housekeeping and maintenance stuff that doesn't fit into regularly planned and scheduled deliverables.
Whenever someone says something like "man, our version of Node is super old. We should really look into getting onto at least the current LTS". That's when you say "Add it to the chores!" so you all don't forget about it.
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.
New epic called " v2" 😅
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.
We have a similar epic called 'quality', from the idea that all the little odd jobs and chores have the goal of improving overall quality. Very generic, I know, but it helps to create some focus.