“Developers should only need Github Issues and Pull Requests to do their job” — Why should anyone need more than that to track work?
Small companies and startups have small engineering teams. The amount of effort required to understand the ongoing and planned work is low due to sheer lack of ability to take on too much and succeed. Failure weeds out the companies that take on too much, too soon.
Companies succeed and grow, and so do the engineering teams. At some point, multiple engineering teams are created or evolve. Ideally, these teams are self-sufficient and isolated from each other, creating modular and decoupled output. This ideal state rarely lasts and soon cross-team projects start to appear. Teams continue to evolve into product and platform functions, creating more opportunities for cross-team dependencies.
At this point, work can no longer be tracked at the developer-level alone. Success requires collaboration and coordination. Companies without a cohesive work tracking system that can span individual teams start to slow down. Requirements and dependencies become difficult to track and are often not meeting expectations which lead to rework and churn. Deliverables aren’t meeting the guesstimate timelines and drag on.
Making work visible is a core attribute to many different methodologies and processes, even the ad-hoc ones. If you don’t have a bird’s eye view of the engineering work happening at your company, what can you say about your situation? Very little. Try to ascertain the status of a given cross-team project without asking someone. If it takes you longer than 5 minutes, you’re in trouble and the people you would have asked don’t really know either. All of this work required to figure out a project status is wasting people’s time.
Work tracking is something that isn’t hard to introduce and provides value. It doesn’t require adding any extra work for developers, but starts to also provide value to team leads, project managers, and senior leadership.
“Not Jira!” The cry goes out across engineering. It doesn’t need to be Jira, but don’t hate a tool for being successful at what it does. Just because most companies don’t put enough effort into running Jira well doesn’t make work tracking tools bad in general. Pick something else — except fucking spreadsheets!
“You die a hero lightweight tool, or you live long enough to become the villain bloated enterprise-ready system“
See also: Merits of Bug Tracking