TL;DR

My first impression of management was that they try to plan everything. The result of those plans were failures because plans were not feasible. So I concluded that I also do not have to do micro-planning. Here is why I was wrong.  The post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

Let’s say that you were assigned a task in Jira, or even better, you created a job related to Epic. To know would you make a deadline (usually two-week sprint), you need to micro plan this task by breaking it into smaller subtasks. You can do it in Jira, which is overkill for me, a simple text file or pen and paper are enough. You can try to schedule the first week of the sprint. You must answer the question about what you must do tomorrow. You can fail or pass on this. Important is to make a note (task report), why you failed or passed the task.

After the first sprint, you will get in the rhythm of mico planning. Practice will make you better at that. Using your task report summaries, you will have material for your manager email report what you did last week. The psychological mind trick is when you have a deadline, it is a high probability that you will finish a task (with fail or pass result). If you need to work extra time to complete a task, do it. You can always plan in next week fewer hours or notify your manager in email report why and what you did in that extra work.

Here is my example. I am currently reading the last two books of Game of Thrones. As my free time is limited, I made a plan to read books in 5 minutes chunks as soon as I have some free time.

Micro planning will help you to become a passionate tester, and practicing it would help you to scale it to more significant levels (project). That skill will help you to become a manager or owner of your own software testing business.