An epic is a collection of user stories with a common strategic goal in agile development. When numerous epics share an exact purpose, they are grouped around a motif, a still-broader commercial objective.
Another significant contrast is that a user story may be finished within an agile sprint’s duration. An epic usually requires numerous sprints of development work.
Based on the requirements of customers or end-users, an agile epic is a piece of work that may be broken down into discrete tasks (called user stories). For DevOps and agile teams, epics are a crucial technique.
Epic
Epics are applied in agile product management to organize tasks and establish structure in the development phase. An epic is a significant project that is broken down into smaller assignments known as user stories.
An epic often stretches across numerous sprints, product teams, and projects. Before they can start generating features from epics, product managers must first break them down into stories.
Theme
Within an epic, all user stories have the same strategic aim and high-level client needs. When numerous epics share the same commercial goal, they form a larger body of work known as a theme.
The scope of an epic will vary as sprints are finished, our understanding of customers’ requirements evolves, and new user stories will be included or deleted from the Epic.
Why Should the Product Team Use the Theme Epic Story Development Framework?
Breaking down a group’s development effort into stories and epics can be beneficial.
Benefits of Epic
It offers better strategic thinking
It is the story point that serves as the basic unit of measurement in agile development. Using this metric, a product on the team’s backlog can be estimated in terms of effort.
To understand how much time and resources it will take to complete an epic, a team distributes tale points to its individual stories. The team can make more informed decisions about using their restricted development time and resources.
Record keeping and time estimations can be improved
How many story points of development work can be completed in a single sprint by a cross-functional product team during the period? After reviewing stories and epics from future projects, that team will know if a scheduled sprint reflects too much or very little work.
This will assist the team inappropriately assessing its capabilities and guarantee that it neither overcommits its assets nor leaves experts underused.
It helps keep the team concentrated on the most key targets
The themes on a roadmap are broad, long-term objectives. The development of a story is a tactical unit of work. Epics are a great way to connect all things on the roadmap and keep the team focused on the same goal.
How Is Epic Applied?
Agile components such as themes, epics, and user stories are used to measure the amount of work that has to be done. An Epic will be considered for the large client request, feature, or demand in some businesses.
The concept of a “larger” job differs from company to company. Some companies may use value stream, Theme, or scope. Many scrum teams may be needed to tackle a wide range of issues in a large project. Each project’s target area is assigned to an Epic, and all user story requirements are linked to that focus area of Epic.
This makes keeping track of the details of a project’s work straightforward.
Final Remarks
For organizing a team’s work and creating a logical hierarchy, epics can be pretty helpful. The aim is to divide significant projects down into manageable chunks to supply value to the company’s consumers regularly and keep the business running smoothly.
Epics are an excellent way for teams to divide their work into manageable chunks while working toward a larger goal.