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

submitted 2 years 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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[–] jmk1ng@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

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.