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:
Table 1 - State machine of the Epic work item
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