A large user story that awaits decomposition into smaller stories prior to implementation. Epics are typically stories that are far off on the development horizon, usually lower priority items. When an epic story works its way up the backlog, it is usually decomposed into smaller stories.
NB: One can easily be tempted to associate the term ‘epic’ with importance; in Agile, epic relates only to size.
Etymology
Mike Cohn coined the term epic as it relates to Agile.
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To understand epic please review below examples.
For HR team an epic may be named as a “Q1 Hiring”. to find how many new resources hired.
For Support team considering deployment of ITIL. Epic name “FLR” can be used to identify how many issues resolved by providing First Level Resolution.
Khalid, I’m not sure these are relevant examples. An Epic is a large body of work that the project owner and team have identified but are not ready to work on. If you were building a software game you might have “Multi-player support” as an Epic since it’s a feature the product owner would like to include but it involves far reaching design and implementation considerations. Another example might be an accounting software application that has an Epic of “Smart phone support”.
I have a question.
If for example I have a large Project, or Program, with 3 applications involved, can my epics be “application 1, application 2, application3″?
Manolo,
Short answer to your question is yes.
If my ‘large project’ is:
Create a travel booking application
Then I might have epics such as:
Travel booking via the web
Travel booking via Android
Travel booking via iOS
You might find this cautionary look at epics helpful.
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks for you answer Chris
Is there any relevance between a Theme and an Epic?
ViMethod
Originally, an epic was a single large story. A theme was a collection of related stories. These days, the meanings are often interchanged. I suspect this is because some of the popular ‘agile project management’ software products use the terms backwards. As long as all the people you work use the words to mean the same thing, all will be fine.
Cheers,
Chris