Non-coding activities in a software project

Recently in our project, we came up with a list of non-coding activities. Those are the tasks that need be done quite regularly and might be easy to be forgotten.

If we tend to forget them, then there’s a risk that someone else will introduce a process around those activities. Sometimes it may mean new people will be brought so that they “manage” those activities. In my opinion, the more can be done by a developer the better, because we don’t introduce non-technical people to the communication loop.

• read communication on pivotal (and optionally reply)
• read communication on slack (and optionally reply)
• build/monitoring failures
• review commits from others
• work on our tickets
• look at exception notifications
• create new tickets based on build failures or exceptions
• challenge the prios in backlog
• check security updates for gems
• document higher level concepts (architecture, tracking, technical debt)
• remove dead code, unused feature toggles

I will probably keep updating this list, as this may serve our team in the longer run. If you feel that we miss something important here, feel free to comment, thanks!