Hello and welcome to knowledgehut. In this video, we will be explaining the Epic in Agile
and how to create one. So let us begin
In simple terms, Scrum EPIC in Agile Methodology is a big chunk of work which can be divided
into smaller user stories. An epic can be spread across sprints and even across agile
teams. An epic can be a high-level description of what the client wants, and accordingly,
it has some value attached to it. As we mentioned, an epic is a high-level requirement, hence
its scope can change over the course of time.
Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to
break down the work 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
Let’s try to understand this with an example. let’s say, throwing a New Year party at
your place can be an epic requirement for you. To do so, you’ll need to organize your
effort: from the biggest objectives down to the smallest details. You should be able to
respond to change, report your progress, and stick to a plan. Once you are aware of the
epic, you can drill it down to create smaller tasks like creating a guest list, deciding
on the menu, shopping for the grocery, decoration at home, shopping for the new year, etc.
Let’s see how we can create an Epic also called Scrum Epic User Story.
In today’s era, almost all the tools that the team use have the capability to create an epic, it
is up to the product and the team, which type of Epic they want.
An Epic is big, high-level, broad. For example “As a customer, I want to have wishlists
so I can come back to buy products.”
This Epic can be broken down into smaller User Stories like-
“As a customer, I want to save a product to a wishlist.”
And, “As a customer, I want to view my wishlists, so I can buy items from them.”
Some Epics cater to the reporting needs of management. Some Epics are created with a
timeframe in mind, it should not be too long and too short, which means it should not take
more than a couple of weeks to finish. But the widely used way is Storytelling.
So, what is Storytelling Storytelling is a tool which helps you visualize
the flow of events and how they corroborate back up to the Epic. If you feel, your working
pattern does not sit in any of the mentioned ways, create your own. Just remember, Agile
is never prescriptive, it shows you the path and how you want to go over it, it’s your
choice!
Coming back to our example, let us try to break it down into some doable components.
It is really important to create chunks out of the epic so that the team can pick those
up and deliver in a sprint time. You can compare this activity to art which requires precision
in terms of size, priority, minimally interdependent etc. There are some pre-set ways of doing
it, like:
Workflow break down Role-based breakdown, and
Break Down around the timeline
Workflow break down Here in our example, we talked about a project
where we have a New Year party, let’s see how we can break it down in terms of workflow
– Shopping can be a workflow where you need to get the items from outside. Another workflow
can be cooking the food for the guests, the same way we can have decorating the house
as another workflow. This also helps the product owner to easily
prioritize the work, in our case, the Product Owner can be the host of the party. Some steps
in the workflow may not be important right now and can be moved to later stages. Perhaps
baking the cake takes on the priority as it takes time to cool down but the same can be
done later as well.
Role-based breakdown We can also break an epic as per the roles.
There can be different roles in your product or a project, here we have a role of a ‘host’,
‘guest’ or you can have a role as a ‘cook’, you can even add the roles as per your product.
In a role-based breakdown, we talk in terms of that particular persona
Break Down around the timeline Some of the epics can be broken down according
to the time it will take to complete. The team usually divides the work which can be
accomplished in a sprint time. They take up the whole thing, break it into pieces and
fit the pieces in different sprints as per the dependency and priority. As I have already
mentioned, the breaking down requires consideration into several areas such as size, priority,
interdependency etc. Thus, there are two approaches to dividing – Horizontal and Vertical. It
is like cutting the cake, if you cut it horizontally, you will get a single layer but if you take
a vertical approach, you will get to have a bit of all the layers.
So this was all about what is Epic in Agile and how to create one. We hope that you like
our videos. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and visit our website for all
the Agile related courses and certifications.