Epics as steps in the customer journey vs way to release

[Gus Irisa]

We are currently using Epics within the "program" to group all the user stories that will be released. They normally belong to any "step" within the customer Journey. We just group them. That's is OK when we work on a paper based story map.

Now we have a challenge because we are using your great add-on but now the Epics in JIRA are steps within the customer journey and that is conflicting because if we haven't completed all the stories within the epics we cannot ship them. 

Example: we have the journey Login, Select Cards, Enter PIN, Confirmation each step is an Epic and there are multiple stories under them that takes 5 sprints in total to complete but if we want to release to production the items completed in Sprint 1 only and we haven't finished the whole epic we are in trouble, because we release per whole epic.

What is the best way to approach this?

Thanks

[Teagan]

Hi @Gus Irisa, 

Thanks for reaching out on Atlassian Community and glad to heat that you are a fan of our app. 

In order to achieve your desired use case, I would recommend the following approach:

• Use Jira Versions to manage the grouping of Stories for release to customers
  • This way, issues relating to a customer journey step (Epic), can be partially released (that is, not all issue related to an Epic have to be released for a Version to be 'completed')
• Reconfigure Epics as Customer Journey Steps (these will line the top of your User Story Map) i.e. Login, Select Cards, Enter Pin, Confirm  

I'm interested to learn a little bit more about your current setup. Do currently use Jira Versions in your Jira instance? If so, what are these currently used for?

Looking forward to hearing back from you Gus, 
Teagan Harbridge
Product Manager - Easy Agile 

[Gus Irisa]

Hi Teagan

We are using version to tag the user stories with the release but we can have around 100 stories every time that we release. (We release every 6 weeks and we are a large number of teams) and the Epics is currently the way to group the user stories. Once they are grouped we can see those Epics in an Epic Board for the program.

What I am thinking is that we can use versions for grouping for what is going to be released but it is too granular to see 100 stories on a board. We need something that group them. It cannot be Epics because they will be just steps on the Customer Journey. We have the current hierarchy Themes>Feature>Epics>Stories

Thanks for your reply and looking forward to hearing from you soon

Cheers

Gus