This is not an Epic

This is a rant...

In a “recent” post Mike Cohn outlines some of the misunderstandings around the the terms «epic», «user story» and «theme».

This article is actually only “kind of” brand new - it is from 2011.

But thanks to the prevalence of Tools and Process over Individuals and Interactions that has been brought to us by tools like Jira for more than ten years now, it seems to me that it is a good idea to look at a few key points again.

For example Mike says:

There's no magic threshold at which we call a particular story an epic. It just means "big user story."

So, sorry folks: an epic does not group a bunch of requirements that do not deliver value on their own together. According to Mike’s old post an epic simply is a story that “[one] didn't get the chance to break […] down into stories that are […] small enough […].”

That’s why it is such a good idea (at least IMHO) to do whatever you like with that “Epic” thingy in Jira – use it to mark other stories, use it as a theme (see Mike’s post for a short explanation of that) use it to signal states if you don’t have a Jira admin in your team etc.

But whatever you choose to do, don’t do functional decomposition by making your epic an enumeration of sub-functions that only deliver value if they are all implemented together.

...end of rant.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg