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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] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Our approach is by no means the best or even applicable for most organisations, but it goes like this:

There is no such thing as a miscellaneous task. Each hour spent on work should be accounted for towards business goals. If you are fixing bugs, you link the bugs to bug reports or features that describe how the system should behave. The same goes for testing tasks. If you are doing ops, it's either reactive or proactive. Reactive ops are linked to issues and incident reports. Proactive ops are linked to new releases or experiments. If you are doing R&D, link it to a new initiative. If you are doing process automation or dev QOL improvements, have a continuos initiative to account for that work. As a business stakeholder, I need to be able to see where the hours of my 2 dozen devs are going. Are we spending our time on bugs, QOL, KTLO or Features? If I see that half the logged hours are set under 'Miscellaneous', I can't really have that conversation.

Always ask yourself: "What problem am I actually trying to solve".

It can't be that you have a task, no matter how small, that can't be accounted towards any existing business goals.