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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

Does every issue need to be attached to an epic, though? A simple, well-described bug can be enough on its own, I think? You do need to regularly go through the backlog to re-order it, remove outdated tasks, combine duplicates, etc. for it not to become unwieldy.

My/our approach can be summed up as:

if it's code-related, however small, it goes in the backlog, with or without an epic, and it follows the normal flow of things. We have weekly reviews where we maintain the backlog, basically.
if it's not code-related, I personally have a markdown document, where I plan stuff day by day. It started out as a simple way to document the stuff I did so as to not forget anything in the daily standup. But now I routinely use it to jot things down a day in advance or in a special 'must not forget' section. It's proven to be very useful in remembering those little things people ask you throughout the day without jumping on them right away. The bonus is I have a very detailed archive of everything I did spanning literally years by now.