Lessons from a Cool Engineer, Part 1: Breaking things down, section A: making tickets as small as possible

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Lessons from a Cool Engineer, Part 1: Breaking things down, section A: making tickets as small as possible

Okay so. What I was told was: it’s good to make tickets small 
And that no engineer has made their ticket too small
Now this is interesting to me
As a junior baby software engineer etc. I do get my tickets broken down. 

But let’s see if I could keep them small and/or make them any smaller. So my current ticket (which probably should’ve been an epic given how many new tasks keep emerging as a result of it - confirmed by my product managers) is sort of broken down quite small. So let’s see

I was adding a new tab to the page. And we added each new feature one at a time - new button, new link no1 and new link no 2 and etc. (Also adding the new tab was meant to be a task in itself but it is currently hidden behind a feature flag. My final task will be to remove that feature flag. One of my lovely mentors has sent me an example of one of her PRs which is so lovely of her where she removes a feature flag too. I haven’t read it yet as I was too overwhelmed. But it’s there for when I need it. I should probs save it somewhere or pin it). (Done). 

Then more and more stuff kept coming up. Like adding tests for my component. And then adding tests for a child component. Both files keep being built from scratch.

So the ticket keeps getting bigger. But in theory the tasks are small. Or small enough. I don’t know. Surely adding the tests to one file is one ticket (and to be fair for a more seasoned engineer they would automatically just be a part of the ticket). But we are making things teeny for me. Especially as I spent so much time learning the backend but now I am building up from scratch and learning so much more of the frontend again

So look this has been a chaotic blog post with no real conclusions
  • Yes my tickets are already small
  • But could they be any smaller
  • And can I keep them all
  • And if I promote my tickets to epics, tickets and subtasks then I can use my subtasks for even smaller things
  • Each subtask is a commit eg one test
  • This will help me to break things down even more 
    An image of a server room with neon lights. Neon pink text reads: how small can you break down your tickets?
    So what should I do? Should I upgrade my current tickets into epics?
  • I will ask it and find out tomorrow…

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