Epic
Another major topic for discussion here is the Epic, which many think is just a “large story.” However, I like to define epic as an item that can’t be committed to by the team. This could be for a variety of reasons, most of which are captured in the acronym CURB:
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Complex |
The item might be too complex to be understood well enough to be committed to. |
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Unknown |
Maybe nobody on the team knows enough about the story to even make a guess whether it can be committed to. |
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Risky |
There are too many unknowns; it is too risky to commit to the story without further investigation or a mitigation strategy. |
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Big |
It could just be too big to do in one sprint, even though it is well understood. |
In any case, an epic is an item that contains at least one story, even if the story is just an investigatory one. Usually, an epic contains analysis stories that produce other stories that also belong to the epic. In other words, an epic is a container of stories, and we tend to refer to any container of stories as an epic.
Since an epic becomes an epic if the team can’t commit to it, sometimes we are surprised when an item we thought was a story turns out to be an epic during planning; we only find out when the team declines to commit. This is not unusual, because we can’t know whether or not we can commit for sure until we know what “done” means for the item.
Most capabilities are epics rather than stories; the main counterexamples being bugs or trivial features. If we think of a use case as being a typical capability for our software, then it is an epic, with the individual scenarios of the use case being potential stories. Of course, some of them might actually be big enough to be epics of their own.
Some examples of epics are:
• “We want the system to be able to manage the pilots’ schedules”;
• “We’re going to need to train all our users on this new release”;
• “As a <tourist>, I want to <fly to Catalina for the weekend>”; or
• “I need you to translate the website to Spanish, because I’m planning to do a lot of marketing of Catalina Air in Mexico”.
