Epics help identify milestones in your feature roadmap, or even features themselves, making your work more organized and easier to track. You could have an epic titled 'Online Payment' in your backlog and you could flesh it out (Credit card, debit card, store credits.) when your team takes it up during their sprint planning meeting. In this way, an epic can be useful as a placeholder.Īn epic can also help you capture abstract ideas with a single item in your backlog until your team decides to break it down into user stories. It's often not clear what our path is when we set off, so epics are a useful way to capture ideas and flesh them out as we go. Your epic could be called Integration and the user stories required to achieve it could be spread across multiple sprints. For example, if you're working on two-week sprints and you take on an integration between your product and a third-party application, it will likely take more than a single sprint to complete. In other words, epics act as a bridge to transform initiatives into quantifiable values.Įpics are used in agile software development to classify your user stories and lend a structure to your backlog. Just like how completing many smaller tasks contributes to an overall successful event, leaving guests satisfied, the triumph of an epic is determined by completing all the user stories within it, ultimately delivering value to the customers. Ideally, the process of completing and delivering an epic will take between one to three months, depending upon the complexity and rounds of improvements. Unlike sprints, epics in agile do not have a set timeframe for completion. If the client requires a change to the agreed-upon menu for the birthday event, the event planner will promptly inform the hospitality team in charge of the food to make the necessary changes before the event. Epics are designed to be flexible, enabling seamless adjustments and adaptations to align with customer feedback and suggestions. A user story within an epic can be further broken down into smaller action items called tasks.Īn epic is created based on the needs of customers and end-users.

These actionable items are known as user stories in agile methodology. The event planner assigns specific tasks to respective teams the planning team handles venue booking, the creative team manages venue decoration, and so on. Let's consider a scenario where a birthday celebration event with 100 guests needs to be planned and executed. Large and complex epics can span multiple teams, projects, and sprints.

An epic could be a new feature, a feature enhancement, a product, or a customer requirement. These user stories represent specific action items required for completing an epic. An epic in agile methodology is a substantial body of work that can be broken into multiple smaller and requirement-specific segments called user stories.

Epic definition business