this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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How do you organize miscellaneous tasks? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
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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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[–] psudo 1 points 1 year ago

So, my go to is generally to include it in a related epic. I think this is a slam dunk for your "reach maturity level x" examples. To me that doesn't just mean "we added x/y features," but "we have established features x and y, plus everything we needed to make that stable." It won't help with generalized legacy tech debt, but if you stop think of it as debt that can be paid off whenever and instead as part of your normal operations you can get out ahead of your problems. But I'm also a little spoiled as our PM is overworked and generally trusts us to not add it stupid things.