Epics
Investment themes drive all new development. Epics are derived from these decisions. Epics are large scale development initiatives that realize the value of investment themes.
To understand the full relationship between the agile entities:
• Investment themes are realized by epics.
• Epics are realized by features. Epics are managed in the Portfolio level.
• Features are realized by user stories. Features are managed in the Program level.
• User stories are realized by tasks. User stories are managed in the Team level.
The elegance of this hierarchy at implementation time is that if you set up the realizes field in each of these trackers, you get 100% traceability. You can trace back any tiny source code change from its tasks, through its user story, its feature, its epic all along to its investment theme.
Managing epics
Epics should be represented by issues in a custom epic tracker. This should be a requirement type tracker, with further customizations applied to it.
Consider adding the following fields to it:
• Realizes: a reference field that points to the investment theme realized by a particular epic.
• Business value.
• Efforts.
• Alignment to investment theme: the degree of alignment chosen from a choice field with options 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0.
• Weight: Ranking weight should be a field automatically calculated from the formula (business_value/efforts)*alignment.