How To Use An Agile Epic Story For Your Projects
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
By Lenka Davis
What is an epic story?
“Definition: An epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories, or sometimes called “Issues” in Jira.”
A few weeks ago I was in our regular team check-in meeting and we had just finished an Agile phase of our main project. We decided we needed to kick off another related project, but we wanted to keep all the tasks in the same Jira board.
What to do?
We decided to create a second epic story to distinguish between the two parts of the project. Agile user stories can only be associated with one epic story.
What are all the ways you can use an epic story?
Epic stories, or often just called Epics, are used to group a large number of tasks (or ‘Jira user stories’) into an organized group for project managers and their teams. Think of them as a label that allows you to sort and find all the issues related to this ‘epic story’, they are one level higher on the hierarchy of all the regular user stories. It’s a container that helps you see and organize what has to be done.
Usually people assign one Epic story to a group of regular user stories. For example, if you are building your startup’s MVP you can have one epic named Build MVP. Anything related to building that MVP will be added to that epic. Business tasks or technical issues can also be related to the Build MVP epic story. Epics can be used across teams or different types of tasks. In the Atlassian platform when you have a Jira Software project the whole project Roadmap is automatically grouped by each Epic.
Different ways to use Epics
Epics can be used to group tasks or issues. Below are a few examples:
Building the MVP: The building of an initial software release that needs many sprints
Organizing the chapters for Documentation: Tasks or chapters of your documentation
Business Workflow: Business processes that need to be created, such as onboarding a client, sales funnel, etc.
Review cycle of written articles, documents, etc.
Initiatives
In addition to an epic story some projects even require one more level up of organization where they roll up tasks (and their sleeves) into one Initiative. Below is a visual from Atalassian, on how a team could organize their projects with stories, epics and initiatives.
Diagram of several Epic Stories and an Initiative
If you are a startup that is using Atlassian’s Jira platform to organize projects, use this feature to your advantage to help keep the team focussed and organized.
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