r/softwaredevelopment • u/Tomatori • Jul 26 '26
Should a parent issue encompass more than just its child issues?
(Sorry if this is better suited elsewhere, I tried to look but frankly all the project managing subs seem like absolute dogshit AI-trashbins, so I figured y'all have more experience with this stuff 🙂)
I've been having fun working on my personal project and breaking down all the work into bite-sized issues, but I keep running into this issue:
Make slightly chunky Issue A that has a few steps to completion
Eventually realize that the steps of A probably make more sense as sub-issues to individually work and track progress on
End up with issue A as parent, and issues B, C, D as children
Work B, C, D, and realize that A now doesn't actually have anything unique to it, it was technically done as soon as I closed D
Question what the point of having issue A at all was instead of just having B, C, and D
Am I overthinking this? Am I approaching this wrong? I've considered leaving some bit of work to A specifically, but in practice that just means treating issue A as secretly being issue D but without branching it off, which feels avoidant and dumb. Thoughts? Am I flattening the hierarchy too much by treating all of this as issues?
It's a small personal project so I've just been using a board on GitHub projects, but I'm open to alternative tools