Epics and sprints

Raoul Kaiser

I have my epic and 6 stories linked to the epic. I estimated story points for the 6 stories but not the epic. I started my 2 week sprint and have some clarification questions:

1. Should I have put estimated effort in for the 1 epic?

2. Should the epic have been included with the sprint?

3. If I am not including it in the sprint but the 6 stories have to be complete before I can close the epic how do I manage this one epic? Do I mark it as in progress or does it get changed automatically when someone begins a task on one of the 6 stories?

Martin Gill1

This may be down to personal preference. I've not found "proper" way of doing it. Maybe if Jira ever supports full nesting instead of just sub-tasks this might change.

On my team we keep the Epic in the backlog "pinned" i.e. just below the last story needed to complete it. The Epic always moves with that last story. If the order changes, then the epiv gets "pinned" to the last story.

Anything that happens to the last story happens to the Epic, i.e. moveing into sprints, being closed, being re-orderd on the backlog.

We don't estimate the Epic itself.

Hope that helps.