Useful Tips on How to Write Greatest Epics

One of the main things in the work planning is a clear and logical structure of the future development. For example, writing an epic for your project is a really great way, so make no stay to implement it into your work routine!

In our present article we collected some interesting facts about what is the meaning of a real epic (particularly in the context of Agile project management), what is the difference between epics and user stories and how to write them right. Be prepared for the plenty of useful information!

Epic the way it is: definition & value

Let’s imagine a typical beginning of the project development: as we wrote earlier, it all starts with the planning. The team members sit together and begin to think out the basic functionality of the project. They write their thoughts and ideas in the form of tasks and lists, fix all the necessary components and add some possible features…

Epic is one the ways to write a certain description of the future project. Epic usually contains a set of tasks that are connected with each other by one subject matter. This form of project planning helps developers and other specialists to feel the project better, to see its business logistics and execute the work sequentially.

Of course, it’s hard to portray the work without a certain project plan. And that’s why the epics are the best helpers: the main value of epics is the possibility to reflect the most important goals of end users of the product. Thus, the workflow has its own balance and order that are peculiar only to successful projects.

Moreover, writing an epic can provide you the following advantages:

• a harmonious project structure that is collected from technical and functional requirements;
• each of the features of the project described in the epic has its own particular value to the user;
• simple and smooth work on the project with consistent implementation of tasks and checking for their functionality.

Epics vs. user stories: what’s the difference?

It is not accident for us to mention two words — epic and user story — because it’s worth comparing them. At the first glance, these things are equal to each other: both of them provide the main goals specification with tasks and some requirements. However, they actually have a stark contrast.

But first of all, we should learn a couple of things related to our topic. It is no doubt that most of popular IT terms come from Agile project management methodologies that are highly demand nowadays. And our today’s terms, epic and user story, are also the parts of such Agile writing practice as a story-mapping: it is a full concept of the project plan composition that contains many different elements — look at the scheme below:

As it can be seen, the uppermost concept called theme is the general aspect that unites a number of common epics. These epics, in their turn, join a set of similar user stories together. User stories consist of many wishes with accompanying tasks. And finally tasks are considered to be the smallest parts of planning in their volume, but one of the most essential things for project development — tasks are what specialists should implement into life!

Therefore, it makes clear for us how epics differ from user stories, but it won’t go amiss to emphasize their dissimilarities:

• epics contain user stories and not the other way around;
• epics encapsulate more global goals and desires, meanwhile user stories contain particular and more specific goals with subsequent benefits to the user;
• epics do not contain very detailed information, and user stories may be focused on some features in order to implement it into work.

Tips how to create great epics

Well, not it is time to give you some interesting and effective advice how to make your process of epics writing more appropriate and affecting the work in a positive light. We would really recommend you to make a mental note of our following professional tips:

• do not hurry in the epic writing: first you can compose a certain draft of your project’s vision and try to imagine what it is the most necessary and what can be included later. It is not a very fast-moving process so you really have a time to think carefully
• be consecutive in your decisions: if you have a certain idea and you have already written it, then you should create your epic in accordance with the theme of your previous idea. Everything should be logical and in a consistent manner
• check and test every your idea: it does not have to be just a tall tale in your epic — every single feature and every single function should be available for testing of its vividness and effectiveness
• draw on expertise of different highly experienced specialist when writing an epic: everything is simple in his advice — you should not rely on your personal vision and expression only. It is a good tone to read different useful blogs from professionals or books contained a great deal of useful information. Another’s working experience allows you to receive your own experience and rise your professional skills.

Conclusion

The epic is a truly important part in the process of the project planning: thanks to it, it becomes possible to see the real purposes and user’s needs. The right epic is a good helper in the further project development and even the product launching.

We hope that this our article will be interesting for your reading and our tips will be helpful in your work. Anyway, if you have something to add in our material or if you want to share your personal cases of epic writing — please, tell us about it in the comments!