problems assigning epic1 to a team

[Helen Baker]

For running a general IT project, what problems could it cause if I assign EPIC 1 to a team rather than an individual?

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Helen Baker and welcome to the Community!

If that idea is in line with how you organise work at your company / team, I wouldn't expect any.

Epics are mainly used to group work together. The actual work is tracked in work items at the hierarchy level below epics (stories, bugs, tasks, ...). It is usually those lower level items that get assigned and taken through the detailed workflow steps by individual people.

So, as long as you make sure you keep the epics visible in your boards / dashboards / filters / ... where you need them, I wouldn't expect any trouble.

Do you have any specific concerns yourself that led you to this question?

Hope this helps! 

[Helen Baker]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for your reply.  My concerns are:

1) if a task / user story is created below this epic for a member of the same team, can that person re-assign it to some one in a different team?

2) Could a new user story be created as part of that epic and assigned to a resource in a different team?  If so, could it impact reporting, for example if costs are reported on at epic level?

An example:

EPIC 1 could be 'create website' and assigned to web development team, then tasks / user stories are created below and assigned to individual developers.  Once a web developer completes the task he may want to assign it to a tester as part of a workflow. 

Would 'complete testing' be a different EPIC with a different assignee (test team) and the task can pass between EPICS as they move from the development team to the test team?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Helen Baker,

1) if a task / user story is created below this epic for a member of the same team, can that person re-assign it to some one in a different team?

Yes. Assigning a work item is not restricted by assignment of other work items. The only restriction on assigning work items is that you can only select people with the assignable user permission in the project the item is in.

 Could a new user story be created as part of that epic and assigned to a resource in a different team?  If so, could it impact reporting, for example if costs are reported on at epic level?

Yes, the same applies as to your other question.

If you want to report on costs, you would most likely implement a solution to identify the budget / cost center work belongs to. In practice, cost reporting is commonly linked to time tracking. As long as this happens on the actual work items (i.e. your stories) people are using to track their actual work, there should be no problem either.

Would 'complete testing' be a different EPIC with a different assignee (test team) and the task can pass between EPICS as they move from the development team to the test team?

Everything is possible. This is all about how you organise the work within and across your teams. Just a couple of options:

1. If you have testing activities defined up front for a separate testing team and want to make it easy to find them for that team, you can create a Testing epic that lists all testing activities for your project. It might be challenging for people to know what they are supposed to be testing, unless you somehow link the work items to be tested to each assignment.
2. You can create specific testing tasks under an epic that represents the actual work to build what needs to be tested. This may have the advantage that it is under the same parent than the actual work.
3. Testing can be part of your overall workflow. If you test developed stories individually, you can basically move through the statuses from backlog > analysis > development > QA > deployment > done

Those are just some initial ideas on ways to approach this. There are plenty of bespoke solutions in the marketplace as well that help you manage testing in relation to development in a much more robust way as well.

What is best? Actually what best aligns with how you are organised internally. This may evolve as you progress within your organisation over time.

[Helen Baker]

That's great.  Thank you Walter