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How do you organize miscellaneous tasks? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

We habe feature or feature scope epics but also never ending category epics for improvements and support, and project sources. Support gets one task per sprint and subtasks to it. Bugs typically don't fall into epics.

I'm not clear on what misc and organized means for you.

We track (technical) opportunities separately. They put noise into the backlog and never get some. Unless a dev actually does them.

Epics serve for longer term planning and prio.

Other than for sprint planning and refinement the deeper backlog doesn't need much organization. Just some categorization, and to the degree those responsible for picking next tasks/work can do so.

I guess the main tool is epics for categorization. Other than that misc is misc, and order in the backlog is all you can do and is good enough.