Epic, Feature and Spike in Agile Development

Overview

In this tutorial, we will discuss and learn about Epic, Feature, and Spike in Agile methodology.

Epic

An Epic captures a large body of work. Epic is “Big Ask“. It is essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller user stories. An Epic is a big set of user requirements and product features.

It may take several sprints to complete an epic. An Epic can span more than one project if multiple projects are included in the board to which the epic belongs.

Scrum Framework

Sample Epic

For example, sample epic

As a user,
I want new design to e-commerce shopping website
So that, I can access user profile, product orders,
credit cards easily.

Create an Epic in Jira Software

Jira Software is one of the most popular Agile project management tools. We can easily create an Epic in the Product Backlog.

Launch Jira instance. Click the Backlog tab. Select the project.

Select the Issue Type as an Epic to create an Epic.

Epic in Jira

Features

Features are services provided by the system that fulfills stakeholder needs. Features can be tested by the end-users, user stories are not necessarily fully testable for the end-user. In most cases, testing a user story until fully integrated with the rest of the feature might only make sense to the developer.

Generally, features are delivered to our customers, not user stories. One user story should never span more than one sprint, if a user story “spills” to another sprint, it only indicates that we’re missing the estimation and granularity of the user stories.

EPIC

User Story

To know more about User Story and its format:

https://www.testingdocs.com/agile-user-story/

Spike

Spike is a research story that will result in learning, architecture & design, prototypes. It may ultimately result in to set of stories and execution strategies that will meet the functional goal of the spike. Stories that address the need for more information in order to enable decisions or story development. Some spikes might need a demo, although every spike doesn’t need to have a “demo”.