Agile Epic

An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called user stories) based on the needs/requests of customers or end-users. Epics are an important practice for agile and DevOps teams.

When adopting agile and DevOps, an epic serves to manage tasks. It's a defined body of work that is segmented into specific tasks (called “stories,” or “user stories”) based on the needs/requests of customers or end-users.

Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can actually get done and you can continue to ship value to your customers on a regular basis. Epics help teams break their work down, while continuing to work towards a bigger goal.

Maintaining agility when organizing large tasks, like epics, is no small task (pun intended). Learning how epics relate to healthy agile and DevOps best practices is an essential skill no matter the size of your organization.

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.