Developing Epics for Developers

Epics and personas are an important part of Agile software development. They allow the Scrum team to get into the heads of the user, and know the intended use of the product. The product owner typically creates the epics and personas. However, the developer role still has an interest in the creation of epics and personas, as they benefit from having well-written epics and personas in a project.

What is an Epic?

In the context of Agile software development, an Epic is basically a large user story. A user story is a task that an average user would want to accomplish in a software product. If a product contains a database of people, a user story might be to access and edit the information of one person. An epic for this product may be to send a mailer to any person in the database with an address listed. The epic clearly involves more steps, and more code development, than the user story.

Scrum teams make a distinction between user stories and epics because of the difference in development time. A typical user story can be finished within a single sprint. An epic, however, might take multiple sprints to finish. Because of this, the Scrum team will usually break up epics into multiple user stories. Even if the whole epic isn’t finished in a single sprint, each sprint gives more functionality to the stakeholders. Eventually, stakeholders will receive all the functionality required to complete the epic.

Despite their size, epics are typically treated the same as other user stories. They are prioritized into the backlog in the same way. The Scrum team works on them as they would any other functionality. The biggest difference is simply that epics are too large to fit into one sprint. This changes the way that the Scrum team must break them apart.

Epics and personas are an important part of Agile software development. They allow the Scrum team to get into the heads of the user and know the intended use of the product. The product owner typically creates the epics and personas. However, the developer role still has an interest in the creation of epics and personas, as they benefit from having well-written epics and personas in a project.

What is an Epic?

In the context of Agile software development, an Epic is basically a large user story. A user story is a task that an average user would want to accomplish in a software product. If a product contains a database of people, a user story might be to access and edit the information of one person. An epic for this product may be to send a mailer to any person in the database with an address listed. The epic clearly involves more steps, and more code development, than the user story.

Scrum teams make a distinction between user stories and epics because of the difference in development time. A typical user story can be finished within a single sprint. An epic, however, might take multiple sprints to finish. Because of this, the Scrum team will usually break up epics into multiple user stories. Even if the whole epic isn’t finished in a single sprint, each sprint gives more functionality to the stakeholders. Eventually, stakeholders will receive all the functionality required to complete the epic.

Despite their size, epics are typically treated the same as other user stories. They are prioritized into the backlog in the same way. The Scrum team works on them as they would any other functionality. The biggest difference is simply that epics are too large to fit into one sprint. This changes the way that the Scrum team must break them apart.

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