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These stories are more likely to be vertically sliced. Stories are written uninfluenced by epics.

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Progress is reported against each epic, even though no working software has been delivered to customers.Įpics used to describe large user stories:

Not all tasks are completed by the next reporting cycle.

During story sizing, stories/tasks discovered to be too large are decomposed, further impeding vertical slicing, e.g.

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“Change Password UI”, “Change Password API”, “Authorise request to Change Password”. These stories are less likely to be vertically sliced, and would probably be better described as tasks, e.g. Stories are written to align to the epics, or new epics are created to group the stories.Some of the epics will unwittingly impede vertical slicing, e.g. Epics are created either upfront before any stories are written, or by grouping existing stories.purely as a large story versus used as a grouping mechanism) using a contrived example of a user changing their password with an email notification. Let’s compare the process potentially influenced by the two uses of epics (e.g. For example, why and how would you estimate and track progress toward ‘Security’? Do you really want to be reporting that Story X is “done” but not releasable because it depends on Security Story Y which is not yet done? Ironically, epics that encourage horizontal slicing are not all that effective at reporting progress. These epics encourage ‘horizontal slicing’, which is exactly what we don’t want! Vertically sliced user stories should be incorporating elements of each of these to be considered done. Examples of such epics include ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Monitoring and Alerting’, ‘Front-end/Back-end’, ‘Integration’ to name a few. Using epics to group stories can be an impediment to vertical slicing. When lacking awareness of what good user stories look like, this approach leads us to write poor user stories. Have you ever wondered what drives the questions, “what epic does this story belong to”, or “should we create an epic for that”? Why not simply choose another word to describe a group of user stories? How about ‘feature’, or ‘milestone’? What’s stopping you?ĭoes your team use Jira? The appeal of Jira influences the grouping of stories into epics for reporting purposes and fuels a need to have every story assigned to one. Using epics to group stories deprives us of a concise term that could otherwise be used to emphasise the need for story splitting. My observation is that teams use epics to group stories. It goes without saying that this is confusing, so teams pick the definition that suits them.

But it doesn’t work very well when an epic (large user story) belongs to an epic (group of stories). Calling out a large user story as an epic helps to emphasise the need for story splitting. In this case, most stories probably start out as epics. Writing small user stories is hard, especially when we’re aiming for “very small” (e.g. ‘Vertical slicing’ refers to cutting through each layer of the application to deliver value, as opposed to horizontal slicing, which focuses on one layer at a time. Small and Valuable are arguably the most important, yet also the hardest to do well. Good user stories follow INVEST: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. Good story writing takes discipline and practice. Yet they are notoriously hard to do well. The incremental breakdown of work that user stories yield is essential to agile software development and continuous delivery. In this article, I’ll explore why epics used in certain ways lead to different outcomes, and what you might do instead.īefore we get into epics, we need to talk about ‘user stories’. My observation is that epics either help or hinder good story writing depending on how we use them, and how well we understand what good user stories look like. In a case of Semantic Diffusion, the original definition of ‘epic’ has weakened over the years.

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