AGILE EPICS

 Introduction:

An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called user stories) based on the needs/requests of customers or end-users. Epics are an important practice for agile and DevOps teams.

Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can actually get done and you can continue to ship value to your customers on a regular basis. Epics help teams break their work down, while continuing to work towards a bigger goal.

What is an agile epic?

An epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories, or sometimes called “Issues” in Jira. Epics often encompass multiple teams, on multiple projects, and can even be tracked on multiple boards.

Epics are almost always delivered over a set of sprints. As a team learns more about an epic through development and customer feedback, user stories will be added and removed as necessary. That’s the key with agile epics: Scope is flexible, based on customer feedback and team cadence.

Epic should give the development team everything they need to be successful. From a practical perspective, it’s the top-tier of their work hierarchy. However, understanding how an epic relates to other agile structures provides important context for the daily dev work.

• A product roadmap is a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time.
• A theme is an organization goal that drive the creation of epics and initiatives.
• The product roadmap is expressed and visualized as a set of initiatives plotted along a timeline.
• Breaking initiatives into epics helps keep the team’s daily work — expressed in smaller stories — connected to overall business goals.

A set of completed epics drives a specific initiative, which keeps the overall product developing and evolving with market and customer demands on top of organizational themes.