[ajb257]

It's not micromanagement. It's planning. There's nothing wrong with those tasks having no-user facing changes, or giving all the tasks to acheive a higher-level goal to one developer. However, going in and making those tasks forces you to think over the problem properly and come up with a game plan.

If you don't know a given approach will work, sometimes that's best to timebox some experimentation time (say an afternoon), but then you can also say to your PM/EM 'ok, we need a little time to work out how long it's going to take', and decisions can be made accordingly as to priorities.

Very little of being a software engineer is about writing code. That's just typing. The skill is being able to come up with a coherant plan to solve a problem. That's why architects don't tend to write a lot of code.