Introduction to Scrum Epic
The following article provides an outline for Scrum Epic. In Scrum, time is spent by the teams that complete the work in refining the top items in the Product Backlog. In order to minimize work in progress, not more than one-quarter of a Sprint should be consumed by user stories. While still providing correct value to the clients in most cases, these user stories can be made much smaller than that.
Epic can be defined as a large user story that requires more than a quarter of a sprint to complete taking months usually to complete an epic. User Stories, into which a set of elements has not been justified yet, is known as Epic. It can be explained as a big goal, which is soon to be simplified and divided into small tasks and many tasks, onto which the Agile team will work.
Epic is usually known as the “ top tier’’ or a working ranking, which is broad in scope, having incomplete details and ready to split into smaller multiple stories before they can be worked on. In order to help an organization achieve its overall business goals, an Epic is broken down into daily tasks called ‘user stories.
Scrum Epic Examples:
- As a start-up, I want to select a marketing campaign for my company.
- In the Hotel business, I want to Maximize Revenue.
- As a car dealer, I want to create an app to reach out to more customers.
Reporting needs of management is catered by some Epics, whereas keeping timeframe in mind some Epics are created, keeping it summarised, not too long, and too short, which shall not take more than a couple of weeks to finish, but the most used way is Storytelling, now let’s learn about storytelling.
Important tips while generating Scrum Epic:
- The Epics that you create must be easily tracked by team members.
- An epic can be anything like a customer request, product feature, or business requirement.
- The culture of your organization specifies the size of the Epic.
- Time taken to complete an Epic must be accurate, neither too short nor too long.
- To measure epics, burndown charts can be used to give an actual and estimated amount of work to be done.
Storytelling/User Story
The tool which helps in visualizing the flow of events and how they authenticate back to the Epic is known as Storytelling. These are simply a list of items that need to be done in a project by creating chunks out of epic so that the team can pick up these chunks and deliver them in a sprint period. Owned by Scrum Product Owner, it is basically a to-do list. To make a large project successful, the idea is the break down its shippable pieces by involving multiple teams.
User Story is defined as project requirements that help Scrum team members by giving information that how the final product will be like and helps in calculating the time of completion of the project.
Important Tips when Writing a User Story
- User stories must be short and summarised in easy language so that they can be understood by team members.
- The user story can be written by anyone, although it is owned by the Product Owner.
- To make the customer understand the final product, user stories are expressed in plain language.
- The ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ of a project is answered in a simple language.
- User stories are the most important part of Scrum, as they act as the ladder to complete the sprint.
Task
A more detailed set of User stories below each epic is known as Task. The Scrum Team members have to identify and sort the task to turn those stories into workable components.
Detailed pieces of work are known as Scrum tasks that are necessary to complete a story. Tasks are assigned to team members having the skills to complete them in a time range from a few to several hours not exceeding 12. Only when all tasks are completed a story is said to be completed. For easy tracking, Tasks are placed on a Scrum Board. The Scrum Board consists of four categories, 1) User Stories, 2) Task Not started,3) Task In progress, 4) Task Completed.
Done The agile team easily keep track of the sprint with the help of the Scrum Board, which serves as a very useful visual tool to the members, and also the board is daily updated, which not only help team members to sustain speed but also gives a clear idea to the team that where are they in a particular sprint.
Hence you have to learn how to write epics, stories, and tasks as it is very essential for a successful Scrum Sprint. Epic, Story, and tasks are basically the foundation of the sprint, helping the team to understand, what needs to be done, how shall it be done, and within what time it needs to be completed.
Benefits of Scrum Epic
- Understanding the high-level requirement of the stakeholders is the most important benefit of Epic as it explains what exactly is needed by the stakeholders.
- The scope of work is also defined with the help of Epic, as in what the agreement with the client says and express efficiently than what the client needs.
- Bigger thoughts in a product backlog are tracked with the help of Epics without overloading it with multiple things. Epic also produces the original idea, which is closely related to a particular outcome establishing a ranking for the backlog items.
- With the help of Epic that is split into multiple stories and tasks, Agile Development teams efficiently groom and manage their product backlog.
- Epic helps in time estimation of completion of the project by being used as a placeholder time and again for new views that are either thought out incompletely or whose full development has been suspended till essentially wanted.
Pitfalls in Scrum Epic
- Sometimes confusion is created around the end deliverable from the Epic, as can be viewed as just large user stories by the Team.
- The chances of ambiguity increase as the team try to estimate Epics at a very high level; such estimates will not be of any use if not served any purpose in reporting.
- Epic is worked upon as per an organizational approach that suits their needs as there is no fixed way to work on the Epic.
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