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?
If the work is expected to make it into the deliverable product, then it should fall under a feature. Either add it to an existing feature or create a new one. I prefer the former because it results in less deceptive forecasts.
What about improvements to the feature after it’s been delivered? You develop, test, review, validate, etc, then deliver the feature, and then you get user feedback that you need to make some minor changes or improvements. The original epic is closed and there’s not enough work to warrant a new epic, so where does the task go?
Epics don’t have to be huge. And stories don’t need to be attached to epics in the first place.
An epic is just a way to organize features. There’s no hard and fast rule for how many features are needed to form an epic.