What I've learned about Jira
- A task should correspond with exactly one deliverable.
- The task should be written not as if it’s going to be read for the next two weeks by your current team but three years from now by a completely different team who inherited your codebase (and your backlog.)
- Be unreasonably rigorous about inundating the task with context. Links to the PR, links to the merged commit, paper trails of slack logs, transcripts of random conversations you had about it at lunch.
- “Epic” is a dumb name for a good idea. But epics have denouments.
- It’s not done until it’s merged, deployed, and tested.
- If you don’t (roughly) know how long a task will take, then you shouldn’t create the task.
- Backlog horticulture is very boring and very important.
- Nothing should be “In Progress” for more than three days.
- Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
- You always wish you had been more diligent; you always resolve to do a better job in the future.
Have a good Sunday.
(Sorry this was on the later side. I had a race to run and a Belgian ale to drink.)