When you intend to adopt Agile in your organization, managing tasks will become easier with an Epic. It is nothing but a body of work that is grouped into particular tasks. The grouping is done based on the requests or needs of end-users or customers.  

Epics will be of great help with organizing your work such that hierarchy creation will become easier. The proposal is to split work down into chunks that can be easily completed. When the work is divided into smaller groups, large projects can actually be done. Also, when you follow this approach, you can continue to deliver value to your customers regularly. 

Epics are helpful teams in any organization to split their work down. But, this type of splitting does not hinder them from marching towards their bigger goals. We will understand what Agile Epics are. But, before that let us understand the meaning of Epic:

What is Epic in Agile?

When it comes to Agile Development, an Epic is a term used for referring to a series of User Stories that share a broader strategic goal. When many epics share the same goal, they are again brought together to form an even broader business objective known as a theme based on epic Agile definition.

When you take the case of an Agile Sprint, User Stories can be completed within the timeframe. Coming back to Epic, it will typically need the development work that covers different Sprints.

How is Epic Used in Agile Software Development?

User Stories, themes, and Epics are terms of Agile that help with categorizing the amount of work. In some businesses, they have a practice. Whenever, they get a requirement, feature of request from a bigger customer, they consider it to be an Epic. The term bigger differs from one organization to another. 

However, some businesses follow the scope, value stream, or theme approach. When it comes to complex projects, where different focus areas are to be covered by many Scrum Teams, Epic can help. You can create epics for varied areas of focus of the project. Also, all requirements can be created as User Stories. Then, the User Stories are pointed to the specific area of attention of Epic. This approach makes tracking the particular work area of a project easier for any organization.

In Agile software development, the business can follow a thumb rule. In case, there are more than 5 User Stories with similar focus areas, an epic creation can be a good idea. After creating an epic, you should link these 5 User Stories to that Epic.

How to Write Epics for Agile Projects?

It will not be an overstatement to say that a well-prepared epic can provide the platform. During the development process, teams can refer to this platform to clarify their doubts. In turn, resolution of conflicts and misunderstandings within the team can happen with ease. Here are 4 strategies that Product Managers can follow to write epics:

1. Introduction:

The first introduction part of any epic should give answers to the questions of why and what. For instance, let us consider that you are writing an epic to develop a new feature. In this case, this part of the epic should describe why you are intending to develop it. You should also provide details about what are the expectations of the users and what you wish to achieve with the new feature. 

Let us consider that you are building a chat service. In this service based on user requests, you are intending to add the feature of uploading user photographs. In the intro section, you should say that with the new feature, the users will be able to upload and even share their photos. Also, say that by the addition of this feature, we can increase the number of messages a user sends.

In simple terms, the introduction part of an Epic should contain:
 

• Legal requirement if required
• Marketing plans for the new feature
• Early wireframes if any available
• Links to docs of early wireframes
• The metrics you would like to improve
• Why do you intend to introduce this new feature
•  A summary of what the feature is all about

2. Product Requirements:

In this part of the Epic, you should explain to your team that they should understand what they are going to produce, design, evaluate or release. For instance, you are planning to introduce a feature. You want this feature to be available in all versions of your software like a desktop, mobile, mobile app. You should provide this information in the requirement section of the epic. In the example above of uploading images to a chat service, the epic should contain the following in the product requirement part:
 

• Select a picture from any device
• Instigate a picture message from the message window in the chat app
• Preview the picture before sending or uploading
• Possibility to cancel image sending before it is delivered to the other party.
• Send pictures of any resolution from a personal device
• Get a notification about the successful uploading of one or more pictures
• Possibility to preview the uploaded image before sending it
   

3. Design Needs:

Designers always think that any new feature added should bring in the best user experience. So, it is important to work with the UX designing team when preparing the design needs section of the Epic. Your designer might think that to provide a good experience, a preview of the image should be of a particular size. This requirement should be shared in Agile Epics. This section of Epic should include the following for the case above:
 

• Pictures are to be stored in the company’s servers. In turn, users can see them at all times even when they switch off their devices.
• The standards for the size of the pictures in pixels.
• The standards for the size of the previews
• When the user is awaiting upload, he/she should see the progress in the form of a loading indicator
• Success indicator to show once the upload is completed.
   

4. Engineering Requirements:

For engineering and tech leads, the fourth part of the Epic should be written. The reason is that their inputs are highly important when estimating and developing the epic with correctness. Engineers might show interest to integrate with other systems so that they can ensure the right maintenance of image quality. So, it is better to mention these requirements when writing an epic. In the Epic in Agile example we discussed, here is what engineering requirements should include:
 

• Addition of an auto-delete feature for the removal of the pictures after a year.
• To connect with the pictures in the database, user IDs should be extracted from the user profiles.
• The requirement for a database that can handle scaling to a particular number of images with the utmost 10MB per picture.
   

Understanding Epic within a complete Agile Program:

The goal of epics and User Stories in Agile and Scrum should be to empower the Development team. It means that both these should provide the Development team with everything they need to ensure their project success. You can consider it to hold the top position in the work hierarchy. Nevertheless, for daily development work, understanding how an epic associated with other Agile structures is important:
 

• There should be a plan of action to explain how a solution or product will improve over time. This is nothing but a product roadmap.
• The creation of initiatives and epics should be motivated. This is possible with the organization goal called theme.
• The phases of the product development are visualized and expressed in the form of a set of initiatives marked along a timeline.
• Splitting these initiatives into epics will help keep the daily work of the team explained as smaller stories. However, this should be done with a focus on achieving the overall business goal.
   

When a set of epics is completed, it will drive a particular initiative. In turn, the overall product development demands evolve with customer and market demands on top of the themes of a business.

In our Epic in Agile Example above, the theme will be to increase the number of users sharing their pictures. Here, the roadmap will keep an eye on increasing picture sharing. The initiatives would be to bring down costs and increase the number of users for the chat service. In this case, each epic would get into the initiatives.

What are Epic Features?
 

Epics in Agile are similar to epics in literature or film. So, even in Scrum Epic, it is possible to split epic into particular pieces of works called Features. These are framed based on User Stories. In other words, an Epic User Story is created after understanding the needs of end-users or customers. To make things easier for Agile teams, the epic feature User Story is split.

From the example above, you might have gained a better understanding of Epic features and User Stories in Agile.

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