Grouping with Themes or Epics

Agile uses many tools to break up business and end-user requirements into smaller, more manageable work tasks. One of the more common tools you’ve probably heard of is user stories. User stories are great for describing how features on an application should look and function from a specific end-user perspective. After several sprint planning meetings, often teams are left with a large number of user stories. When the number of user stories reaches a relatively high number it becomes hard for the team to keep up with and prioritize the user stories. Thus, preventing the team from creating more code.

A common practice in agile is to create what is known as, a theme or epic. Themes and epics are groups of user stories that are typically organized to be designed to replicate appropriate work-streams. Some epics might be organized based upon relatively close value propositions. Others might be organized solely based off of what feature of the application they will be functioning with (example might be, ‘Upgrade database’).

The goal for a theme or epic is to serve as a placeholder for a group of user stories to be later broken down into specific user stories. An epic by itself doesn’t hold much value to agile teams and doesn’t provide enough information for team members to start working effectively. Think of it as though someone has come to you with a task that must be completed by next week. Just telling yourself, “Time to go do this task!” is a great attitude to have, but without further direction you can’t get much accomplished.

The first course of action would be to break the weekly task down into smaller tasks that could be completely daily. After breaking the overall goal into daily tasks some tasks might still appear too complex to complete in one sitting. So once all tasks have been broken down into manageable tasks that can all be completely individually in one sitting, you have experienced taking an epic and breaking it down into user stories.

Breaking epics down into user stories is not always trivial and can prove difficult to achieve for more inexperienced agile teams. A popular acronym exists, FEEDBACK, for assisting teams who are breaking epic into smaller user stories. Each letter can be a different strategy used when trying to break down an epic.

The letter F represents ‘flow’. A user story should read well and the reader should understand what the author of the story was trying to convey from reading it just one time. Make sure to use proper English and grammar so other team members can easily understand your user story. The first E stands for effort. Some developers might break down epics into stories based upon the amount of effort that would be required to. The next E represents entry. Developers can additionally break down user stories from how the end-user enters data into the system, whether it be based off input or automated GPS location. The D stands for data operations. You might break down stories based upon how the data is being manipulated whether that be insert, delete or update.

Next up is the letter B, which is where the team will break down the epic into business rules. After B the remaining letters are A, C and K. These letter stands for alternatives, complexity, and knowledge, respectively. Alternatives are stories that are similar to other but vary of very specific details, such as how you entered the data, or where you entered the data. Complexity is pretty intuitive in the fact that stories can be broken down by how complex completing the story might. Other times the team might need more knowledge about a given epic before breaking it down into smaller stories. Spikes are usually created by the developers in this scenario.

Themes and epics certainly serve a purpose in an agile project, but themselves are not a usable tool. Creating effective and relevant themes can prove to truly help a project succeed or fail. Agile teams must think carefully and act efficiently when breaking down epics or the team members might find themselves wasting a lot of precious time.

Work Cited:

"Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories." www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Grouping-themes-epics/175074/387215-4.html. Accessed 12 Nov. 2017.

Image Provided By:

https://www.slideshare.net/Managewell/user-stories-34655777