Work Item Type: Epic
This work item type is used to track the work associated with managing an epic.
Main description

An epic is a "large" user story that is broken down into smaller user stories. In the practices content there is no distinction between user story and epic as separate artifacts, but in IBM Rational Team Concert the epic is called out as a separate work item type because it has a slightly different set of properties than a user story work item.

The epic work item can be assigned an owner, which may be responsible for breaking it down into smaller user stories that are more easily managed and assigned to developers in an iteration. The epic owner would then mark the state of the epic according to the proposed state machine - the epic would be considered "done" when all child user stories (and other assigned tasks) are marked as done.

The following table shows the Epic work item state machine:

Output State

Input State

New

In Progress

Invalid Done Deferred
  Initialize / Plan Iteration (Project Level)        
New   Start Working / Develop Story: (story name) (start) Reject / Plan Release Complete / Run Tests

Defer / Plan Release

In Progress

    Reject / Plan Release Complete Testing / Run Tests Complete Testing / Plan Release
Invalid Reopen / Plan Iteration (Project Level)        
Done   Reopen / Plan Iteration (Project Level)      
Deferred Reopen / Plan Iteration (Project Level)   Reject / Plan Release    

Table 1 - State machine of the Epic work item