Tracking

An epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories.

An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called “stories,” or “user stories”) based on the needs/requests of customers or end users.

Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down 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.

Maintaining agility when organizing large tasks, like epics, is no small task (pun intended). Learning how epics relate to a healthy agile program is an essential skill no matter the size of your organization.

It's tempting to think that user stories are, simply put, software system requirements. But they're not.

A key component of agile software development is putting people first, and user-stories put actual end users at the center of the conversation. Stories use non-technical language to provide context for the development team and their efforts. After reading a user story, the team knows why they are building what they're building and what value it creates.

User stories are one of the core components of an agile program. They help provide a user-focused framework for daily work — which drives collaboration, creativity, and a better product overall.

What Are Agile User Stories? A user story is the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. It’s an end goal, not a feature, expressed from the software user’s perspective.

The purpose of a user story is articulate how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer. Note that "customers" don't have to be external end users in the traditional sense, they can also be internal customers or colleagues within your organization who depend on your team.

User stories are a few sentences in simple language that outline the desired outcome. They don't go into detail. Requirements are added later, once agreed upon by the team.

Stories fit neatly into agile frameworks like scrum and kanban. In scrum, user stories are added to sprints and “burned down” over the duration of the sprint. Kanban teams pull user stories into their backlog and run them through their workflow. It’s this work on user stories that help scrum teams get better at estimation and sprint planning, leading to more accurate forecasting and greater agility. Thanks to stories, kanban teams learn how to manage work-in-progress (WIP) and can further refine their workflows.

User stories are also the building blocks of larger agile frameworks like epics and initiatives. Epics are large work items broken down into a set of stories, and multiple epics comprise an initiative. These larger structures ensure that the day to day work of the development team (on stores) contributes to the organizational goals built into epics and initiatives.