
Ask HN: What does an Epic represent for your team? - vikashkoushik
From the conversations I&#x27;ve had, for most software teams, epic basically equals to a feature they are building. It&#x27;s broken down to user stories and tasks. I&#x27;m curious to know if you use an Epic to represent something else within your software team?
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kevsim
We use the term "theme" rather than "epic" but it's in the same ballpark in
terms of "thing used to gather issues together". However, we don't use them to
represent features, instead we use them to represent initiatives or goals. We
try to work in a way that we're focused on the outcome (what does doing this
work accomplish for our users) rather than the output (which features are we
going to ship). This in turn means that a theme is not done when the code is
completed. Instead we need to follow up on metrics, feedback, etc. and ensure
that we got the outcome we were after.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of kitemaker.co, an issue tracker that is quite
focused on themes and trying to help teams improve.

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quickthrower2
Sounds like a sensible approach and also I believe thinking of outcomes is
better for happiness and motivation than being a code factory or task factory.

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sethammons
For us, an epic is a unit of related work which is usually sized for
completion in under a quarter or two. Many epics may be completed to get
through an initiative. Ex: initiative may be “make a new service to replace
section $FOO of a monolith.” If this is able to be done in a quarter or so,
then it is the epic. If it is larger, we may break it up into milestone epics
like prototype, beta release, full release, and clean up. Like you say epics
will be composed of stories, tasks, and spikes (investigations).

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scanny
The desired goal of the client, which is then broken down into features and
tasks.

e.g. Epic -> "We want to georeference imagery in ${app}" Feature1 -> Upload
Imagery to app Feature2 -> Manipulate imagery that is visible on the map with
the mouse cursor FeatureX -> ... TaskY -> Warp an image via canvas TaskZ ->
...

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sbmthakur
My work involves integrating financial institutions with our tech. In our
workflow, each Epic corresponds to one institution.

