What is an Epic and User Story? How to name Epics & User Stories?
Basic understanding of epics & user stories.
What is an Epic?
There is no Wikipedia definition of Epic yet as the concept is still evolving. But there is a basic understanding of what is an Epic. If you are new in your PM role this will look confusing, sometimes epic can be a major feature which needs lots of components in form of user stories to be complete in order for the feature to work and sometimes it can be a major component which will include number of building blocks in forms of user stories to be complete. All in all epic can be defined as:
‘Epics are large chunks of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller pieces’.
When a feature has multiple scenarios, multiple implementation that Feature becomes an epic. When a component is bigger than one building block and needs to built in multiple building blocks that component becomes your epic.
Epic is the grouping of one or more features or functionality that we want to develop in order to achieve a goal.
In the above picture I have used an example of instant messaging service. Hence, the Instant Messaging Service becomes our initiative, and in order to achieve the goal of giving our users with the Instant Messaging Service we need to develop the service, and finalize the features/functionality we will include in our service. The initiative may have been originated based on the visions and goals of the company, but we will skip that part for now and try to understand in depth about Epics & User Stories.
The features or the functionalities that we finalize to build becomes our Epics. In one feature or functionality (Epic) the user will have multiple scenarios. For eg, in the epic of sharing photos and videos, the user will have to upload or attach a video, look at the preview and send the video. The user would may be like to come back to the video they have sent, so on and so forth, these are our User Stories. All the scenarios will then need development in multiple areas that will complete the user scenarios like upload button in the text field of keyboard, resizing the images, resizing the videos, supporting formats etc. those are the task & sub tasks.
