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Software Engineering vocabulary · Agile and Team Workflow

Epic

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈepɪk/nounCore term

In software engineering, epic means: A large piece of work that is too big for one sprint and is broken down into several smaller user stories, such as “Multi-currency support”.

In Turkish: epik, büyük iş paketi

How it is used

Used in Jira and similar tools to group related stories. PMs create, break down and close epics, and report progress on them to stakeholders. In everyday English epic means heroic or great; in agile work it only means a large body of work.

Example sentences

  1. The new checkout epic has twelve stories, and eight are done.

  2. Let's break this epic down before sprint planning.

Common collocations

  • create an epic
  • break down an epic
  • epic owner
  • link a story to an epic
  • user storyA short description of a feature from the user's point of view, often written as 'As a [type of user], I want [goal] so that [reason]'.
  • backlogThe ordered list of work a team has not started yet, such as features, bugs and improvements, with the most important items at the top.
  • story pointA unit that agile teams use to estimate how much effort a task needs, based on its size, complexity and uncertainty rather than on hours.
  • backlog refinementRegular work in which the product owner and the team review upcoming backlog items, clarify them, split large ones and estimate them so they are ready for a sprint.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Agile and Team Workflow

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