It is an introduction of a project I've built for my own use; I am an engineering manager and will be speaking to other "managers" out there, but it can and should be used (and has been since we introduced it in our team) by engineers to manage their own load.
tldr;
Shuffle and assign tasks among your team members: https://shufl.now.sh/
Motivation
We maintain an open team culture, where we trust everyone is a professional and does their job responsibly and to their best abilities, improving personal contribution and team's performance as the whole.
Enough has been said about the importance of maintaining such leadership culture in modern product teams.
One of practical examples is reviewing pull requests.
Ideally, you would review PRs as they come up.
On practice, it is not always happening and every day at a stand-up we would compile a list of of PRs from past day ready for review, send it in slack and let engineers pick them up and review, ideally before lunch.
It works well until the number of PRs exceeds your team bandwidth. Add a couple of urgent tickets that need to be merged "now" and you have a challenge to address.
Just putting a list of PRs and let the team pick them up may lead to everyone jumping on the first PR on the list and leaving less time for others. That's when you need to intervene and manage priorities.
You can do it manually by asking certain people to pick certain PRs. It can be time consuming and, worse, introduce bias and favouritism.
Solution
Instead, we ask technology for help.
First, I used random.org to randomise assignments, but it is not that handy: you have to keep list of people somewhere aside to copy-paste quickly, and you cannot easily assign 2+ reviewers per PR.
That's when we introduced my little project to shuffle and assign tasks randomly with custom number of assignees per task.
It comes in two versions:
Web: https://shufl.now.sh/
and CLI: GitHub
Example of using CLI version:
We successfully use it for other assignments, like occasional manual QA rounds, or buying fika.
Contributions and suggestions are welcome.
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