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 <this> feature.” But what about bug fixes and other random improvements and miscellaneous tasks? How do you keep those organized?
There are other tools but my favourite is something like Gitlab/Github’s ‘issues’. It’s simple. You can add custom project tags (e.g. ‘minor bug’), link it to other issues, comment, assign it to someone, etc. Gitlab itself pitches it that way:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/
What I do is to generally avoid things that require others to learn a lot. Let’s face it, most people won’t be bothered and not to mention their time is best spent elsewhere. Gitlab and Github are essentially just a small step from Git, which makes it straightforward.
I have seen managers who were too eager and made their process unnecessarily complex. And I have seen managers who didn’t give a rat’s arse. Both sucked to work for about as much. Be careful with going the extra mile because upper management might think it good but us programming plebs might not. I hope you find a good balance.
We are already using GitLab