what is epic in agile development
In Agile development, an “Epic” is a large, high-level user story or requirement that can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces known as “user stories”. Epics are used when there is a significant chunk of work that involves multiple complex functionalities and may span multiple sprints or iterations due to their size.
Epics provide a broad overview of what needs to be accomplished, helping teams to understand the bigger picture. They help in planning, particularly in product backlog refinement and road mapping because they allow teams to see and plan large pieces of work far ahead of their implementation.
For example, in an e-commerce app project, an epic could be “Develop a customer review system”. This epic could be broken down into smaller user stories like “As a customer, I want to rate a product so that others know my opinion”, “As a customer, I want to write a review about a product”, “As a potential customer, I want to read all reviews of a product”, and so forth.
Over time, these epics will be further split into smaller user stories that can be completed within one sprint. Each user story contributes towards achieving the larger goal of the epic. When all the associated user stories for an epic are completed, the epic is also considered complete.
