What is an epic?

Epic is a term used in the field of agile product management. Epic is a method for prioritizing missions in the product-making process. An epic is a big piece of tasks that are separated into parts, referring to user stories. The company will share an epic amongst a few different items and even products. Each employee is a spouse to form stories from an epic before they can begin moving them into function.

Epics are a collection of tales organized around a common strategic goal in agile development, according to the definition provided by the Agile Development Framework. The epic, or epics, are then grouped under a ‘theme.’

As part of an epic, user stories have the same purpose and seem to end users’ needs. Like user stories, epics are often collected into a more expansive, more considerable array of work – a theme.

Epics vs. Features in Scrum

Even though epics, features, and user stories are linked, they pertain to entirely separate things.

Epics are a general term that refers to the entire body of work that needs to be accomplished. In terms of employment, an epic is a significant piece of work that will strategically enhance the value of your product and company.

A feature is a subset of the epic storyline. Features are deliverables that offer value while also progressing the epic towards completion.

For example, a user story is a portion of a feature that describes the user’s experience. User stories are short requirements or requests written from an end user’s perspective.

The Benefits of Epics

Consider the following scenario: your theme (a product’s high-level purpose) is to sell airline tickets. One epic may be to develop personalized must-see destinations or itineraries based on the data profiles of your users. This may entail obtaining authorization from users to track their search histories, designing and sending personalized email campaigns, or hosting suggested pages on the website, to name a few examples of stories (small units of development work).

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by your workflow or been unclear about the strategic significance of a particular feature or build, taking the effort to organize your epics can help you feel more in control. Epics reduce the amount of time spent on useless activities.

As the middle layer of the theme > Epic> tale framework, Epics can help the team understand where a team should focus their efforts. In the case of many stories inside an epic that does not contribute significantly to strategic value, you can confidently de-prioritize those stories later.

Your company can use epics to improve project planning and management. When all you have is a backlog of tales or themes that are too broad to comprehend, it can be tough to give precise development timelines to them. It is possible to determine a meaningful time guideline for each Epic by summing up the story points — which are units of effort — within each Epic. If it is impractical to anticipate the backlog to be completed within the current sprint, it is preferable to recognize this now rather than later.

Epics vs. User stories

User stories are little pieces of a larger whole called an epic. They are written from the end user’s point of view to allow the developers to see the product or feature they are working on from a different perspective than they would otherwise. A user story should identify a specific consumer requirement that the team can solve either by developing a new product or changing an existing feature.

An epic is made up of multiple stories, each given from a different point of view than the others. Because while epics are told from the perspective of a company’s management team and determine what the company hopes to accomplish, user stories are tiny parts of the epic puzzle that help developers understand what the consumer wants from the broader epic.

While most tools require an epic to be developed before breaking it down into user stories, user stories can be used independently of an epic in some cases. Nothing prevents developers from skipping an epic entirely and concentrating only on the individual user stories.

How to Plan an Epic

A well-put epic can assist in creating better communication that prevents disagreements and conflicts. Here are some tips to help you develop epics in your business:

  •  Your entire crew should take part in building and writing an epic.
  • A well-put epic has a metric. The metric goal will assist the efficiency and progress of the epic you are trying to make.
  • Set up a time frame for your epic. The said time frame should be determined while considering a reasonable period for the job to get done. Both longer and shorter periods than they should be could end up damaging the epic.

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