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Can EPICS be used to track Releases??

Last post 06:36 pm January 8, 2018 by Charles Bradley
4 replies
Fabio Hidalgo
03:59 pm December 28, 2017

Hi All,

In the company I work we have quarterly releases, on which we deliver X number of user stories. Our sprint time box is two weeks. We need to implement a process on which I am able to know which user stories are being part of a quarterly release. With that in mind, I thought of using an EPIC to track the quarterly release, have the features underneath the epic, and then have the user stories which are being delivered within that quarterly release, does this make sense? Anyone has any other idea?

I'm just looking to do some bench marking and see how y'all do it out there and if the idea above makes any sense or not.

Btw, the tool we use is VSTS (Agile Process).

Thank you! 

Nikolaos Friligkos
12:40 am December 30, 2017

What about the iterative delivery of value?

Ian Mitchell
07:35 pm December 30, 2017

The approach you have outlined is not a Scrum implementation since the “sprints” do not yield increments that are ready for release. Instead you have a plan for not releasing in 5 iterations out of 6. Empirical process control is thereby compromised. That’s the issue which needs resolving from an agile perspective.

Fabio Hidalgo
10:22 pm January 2, 2018

I agree guys, when a quarterly release was brought to us, first thing that came to mind was exactly the iterative delivery. I was trying to at least have some tracking of user stories being delivered within a release, even though I'm aware about the scrum values and being able to deliver a working increment each sprint (iteration). Appreciate the feedback..

Charles Bradley
06:36 pm January 8, 2018

I believe that VSTS has a better way of tracking releases but I don't know that it is.  In basic Jira, one can use "version" to accomplish that. (You can also use Epic in Jira for that purpose but it then prevents you from using Epic for it's intended purpose).

Caveat:  Original canon on Epics specified an Epic as a really big story.  Current tool usage often implies a hierarchical or container relationship between Epic and Story.  So, the current common usage is in disagreement with the original canon.  I've given up fighting this fight. :-)  (in original User Story canon, a set of related stories was called a Theme, which tools use for other mechanisms now... uggghhhh), 

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