Adding an Epic to a sprint

Carlo-Antonio M

Hi All, 

I'm fairly new to agile / scrum development and i'd like to know why it would not make sense for an Epic to be added to a sprint. In my head, this seems to make sense but I'd really like someone to confirm or correct my logic, A sprint is to be linked to a smaller, more granular, unit(if you will) of work  a story. Those stories are then to be linked to the larger, broader scale Epics. but is it merely the nature of sprints, a short iteration of work, that makes linking Epics to them not viable?

 

Thanks, 

CAM

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

In the basic theory, Epics are huge overarching pieces of work that are likely to rattle on for quite some time.  They're not really items you work on directly, they're more for grouping stories and tasks together so you can plan.

Stories should be completed within a sprint, and the whole of Agile works on the basis that you plan to do work that you can fit into a sprint (if you fail, that should indicate a problem).  It's very rare that you'd put an Epic into a sprint explicitly, and doing it would suggest it's actually small enough to be a story, rather than an Epic.  You're supposed to break Epics up into stories and work on them, not the Epic directly.