Epics are a Big Deal

Epics, like this hard drive from 1956, 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 be philosophical all the time.  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 larger 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 they 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 estimate of three-story points each.  The team completes twenty-story points a sprint, so you can say with confidence that it will take a sprint and a half to do the work.  If there are similar epics, you can project out the entire length of the 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.  Epics also provide a helpful way to forecast out the development for clients, and the judicious use of epics even aides communication with stakeholders.  It is a good practice to use them in your backlog.

I look forward to hearing how you use them.

Until next time.