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Home | Agile |

Agile : Themes, Initiatives, Epics, Feature, and Stories

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Theme

Are large focus areas that span the organization.  Is an organization goal that drive the creation of epics and initiatives.

A collection of stories by category. A basket or bucket of stories. By its nature, an epic can also be a theme in itself.

However, interestingly, one group thought that themes should refer to business goals. My view is that everything should have a goal (otherwise why are you doing it?!)

Epic

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. Epics often encompass multiple teams, on multiple projects, and can even be tracked on multiple boards. Epics are almost always delivered over a set of sprints. As a team learns more about an epic through development and customer feedback, user stories will be added and removed as necessary. That's the key with agile epics: Scope is flexible, based on customer feedback and team cadence.

An epic is a big story. A requirement that is just too big to deliver in a single sprint. Epics need to be broken into smaller deliverables (stories). This helps them support the agile principles (e.g. delivering working software frequently, early continuous delivery, regular reflection).

Features

A distinguishing characteristic or capability of a software application or library (e.g., performance, portability, or functionality).

User Story

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.

Use Story often follow the SMART acronym: [specific,measurable, achievable, relevant,time-boxed (although what the letters stand for seems to be hotly debated).]{style="color: rgb(255,0,0);"}

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.

A story is an individual feature or requirement that the client (and business) wants. It is something that is deliverable (i.e. production ready) within a single sprint. A story should use the INVEST acronym

Task

Task are not created by the Scrum Master or Product Owner. This is under the discretion of the development team or developer to be more self-organized.

Decide which specific steps need to be completed and who is responsible for each of them.

The elements of a story. Stepping stones to take the story to 'Done'.

However, many teams don't break their stories down into tasks. I have found that splitting stories into tasks encourages teams to split work horizontally, whereas we try to slice work vertically.

References