Epics are a big deal.

It is easy to be philosophical about agile.  I do it and so do other bloggers.  We want to connect our vocation to broader trends in business and economics.  This week, I will concentrate on the basics of agile because you cannot always be philosophical.  Today, I want to focus on epics and what purpose they serve.  

According to the Agile Alliance, an Epic is a recent innovation.  Mike Cohn introduced the concept in 2004, and epics represent more significant user stories the team cannot complete in a single sprint.  These kinds of stories are great placemarks to contain similar work.  Business people rarely understood user stories but often understood epics because they did not want to deal with too much detail.  A business person would not understand a required field validation for a web form, but they would understand when an entire page was ready to review.  The product owner would create the epic and then place the stories necessary to complete the epic underneath it.  It makes it easy to understand the hierarchy in the backlog, facilitating plenty of helpful discussions.  

When a client or executive asks when something will be ready, with epics, you can have a meaningful conversation about deadlines.  For instance, a data entry epic has ten stories with an estimated three story points each.  The team completes twenty-story points in a sprint, so you can confidently say that it will take a sprint and a half to do the work.  If there are similar epics, you can project out the entire project. 

Epics do have a drawback; an inexperienced team or product owner will often use them as hampers to hold unrelated collections of stories.  If this happens, the scrum master or coach needs to step in to make sure epics deliver value and provide meaningful organization to the backlog.  Otherwise, an epic behaves like an empty closet, which can hide clutter when others inspect the backlog.  

Epics are a way to organize the backlog. They also help forecast development for clients, and the judicious use of epics even aides communication with stakeholders. Practice using them in your backlog.

Let me know how you use them.

Until next time.