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?
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
Always ask yourself: “What problem am I actually trying to solve here”.