The idea for this episode of the product worker podcast came from the everyday training of Tim Klein and Dominique Winter. Questions like “When is a user story an epic?” or “How big is an epic?” they hear it almost every day in their training courses that deal with user stories or product backlog management. There seems to be some uncertainty surrounding this topic.
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Epic under the magnifying glass
In order to clear up any uncertainties, Tim Klein and Dominique Winter devote themselves to the topic of Epic in this episode. The product workers not only clarify the difference to user stories, but also explain the historical background of the term. The question is actually: Why are there no more saga and novel? At least in the project management software Jira, these other terms didn’t make it.
Tim Klein follows the thesis (by Mike Cohn): “a story is a story, is a story…”. So an epic is just a label or art term for a very big story. But the other way around: If you divide or split stories, stories are created again. And even if these have to be cut again, only (smaller) stories come out of it. But why is such an almost mythical term used for this? Dominique Winter, on the other hand, likes to use epics and reports on them in detail in the conversation. He also explains how to deal with epics in Jira. What he does when not all user stories of an epic are implemented should be particularly exciting. Both agree that an epic must deliver value.
The origin of the term
It may be pointed out that the scaling framework SAFe explicitly uses the term Epic. There it is a “significant solution development initiative”. SAFe distinguishes between business epics and enabler epics. A more detailed explanation can be found on the website for the framework. In this episode of the Produktwerker podcast, Tim Klein and Dominique Winter deliberately do not go into detail about the epic term in SAFe, but rather concentrate on the origin of the term from Extreme Programming (XP).
The focus of the episode is on the advantages and challenges of working with epics. At the same time, it is exciting to discuss what would be missing if epics were not used at all. As usual in this format, the episode concludes with some tips and tricks on the subject.
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Other podcast episodes and sources pointed out by Tim Klein and Dominique Winter during the conversation:
The current edition of the podcast is also available in the blog of the product workers: “Epic. Useful or not?”.
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