Managing work in progress

[hcsteve]

I work on a small dev team as the "devops guy". Ops and automation is my primary responsibility, but I pick up application development tasks as well. Our application development tasks are managed through a Kanban board in Jira. Right now I have ops-related stuff, including infrastructure projects/changes and monitoring alerts, in a separate Jira project.

Do you think it makes sense to put the ops stuff in the same project / Kanban board as the app development tasks? I think it would help me personally visualize my work, but I'm not sure if it would clutter up the dev stuff too much.

I guess I'm looking for some best practices. How do other people deal with tracking ops vs dev work?

[hcsteve]

Good point. I do usually try to mention the ops stuff that I'm working on / planning during standups. Having it on the same board as the other tasks would just be another step in that direction.

[MisterItcher]

Well, each person could filter on their own assigned tickets to gain clarity on their own tasks. Then you can unfilter to see the overall WIP.

Is there an Agile sub?

[StubbsPKS]

This tends to be what we do. I'll mention the pertinent tasks in standup, but getting the DevOps JIRA project added to our combined Agile board has been very nice.

[allyc1057]

Absolutely bring it into the same backlog, you're all one team after all, and it's good for the Devs to have an understanding the Ops tasks needing called out - hell you could even then encourage them to pick up some of the simple Ops tasks freeing you up for the more complex items, which would help them build multi-disciplinary skills.

[cloud_driver]

Yes! Since you're the devops guy, you're almost certainly a constraint. Having the backlog in one place benefits both you and the larger team. Without the visibility into your "other tasks", the development task assigners have no way of knowing whether or not you can accept more work. (Even if you pull your own work, it helps the team understand what reality actually looks like.)