The company I work for is planning a big release. There are multiple teams and each team’s Product Manager has come up with multiple Epics (we are using JIRA).
Now, we are supposed to guesstimate all those Epics so that release can be planned accordingly. But I don’t understand the idea of this Epic guesstimate. So let’s say my team guesstimate 4 epics and based on our velocity 2 of them can be considered for the release. But that’s just guesstimate anyway right? More importantly, since it is a time-bound release, would it not make more sense to denote that these are release candidates and take an epic as we finish the current one?
-V
The point of the exercise is most like that the Product Managers want to get a feel for what functionality they can expect in the next release.
Most likely, the epics will also not all be of the same size.
Suppose the team can, based on the current velocity, handle 30 storypoints until the release date. Suppose also that the guesstimates come out to:
- Epic A 20 SP,
- Epic B 10 SP,
- Epic C: 8 SP,
- Epic D: 8 SP.
If you just work on those epics in the order given (A -> B -> C -> D), then you might finish the first two of them, if your guesstimates are not too far of reality.
On the other hand, the Product Managers can use this information to re-prioritize the epics and do Epic A last. That way you would be able to finish three of them with a bit of slack to counter the uncertainty in the guesstimates.
3
Ideally If you have something that was estimated to be an epic on the initial estimate you would then hold a separate discussion on how best to break it down into more manageable stories and estimate each one of those, and do that for each epic or at least the most important two. Epics themselves should never actually be part of a sprint, if something with a high stack rank is deemed to be an epic the grooming should be targeted at breaking down that epic. This allows all the newly created stories to be prioritized so all the most important work has the best chance of getting done. By the deadline it may happen that none of the epics are actually 100% done, but all the important bits of each epic are done. This should result in happier customers, because a basic car is a lot better than a car with all the bells and whistles, but it doesn’t have wheels yet.