Let’s assume you are planning to trek Mount Everest. Your plan of action is to undergo professional training, ensure medical fitness, buy a trekking kit, map journey milestones, and kick-start the trek! We summarised this task in a single sentence. However, it’s execution will require a specific period and set of structured processes to reach the highest peak in the world.

To make it simpler, let’s break down this trekking project into layers of work and understand how the essential assets of agile methodology–Stories, Epics, and Themes­–help us set up a systematic approach to deliver quality.

STORIES

Stories (also called user stories) are lightweight agendas for the tech brigade and creators to collaborate, track their performance over sprints, and consistently deliver quality outputs in the form of releases. Stories act as the smallest unit of an agile framework created from the perspective of end-users.

On your road map to climb the Everest, tasks/issues like daily exercise to ensure medical fitness, buying all necessary equipment, and learning trekking skills can be categorised as agile stories.

EPICS

You can view an epic as a level-up formation of inline stories. Epics are not different from a user story. They are broader requirement which needs to be split into a smaller version of tasks or stories. Agile epics are an excellent help to product owners or scrum master to have an elevated view of team performance and ongoing assignments.

Coming back to the Everest project, you need to attain a certain level of fitness to be able to survive the severe climatic conditions. Here, ‘Meeting the fitness levels for Everest tracking’ can be an epic which can be broken down to user stories like doing daily exercise or following a specific breakfast diet.

THEMES

A theme provides a logical view of epics and stories that share similar attributes and point towards a common objective. Themes are not tasks but aspirational objectives that represent overall focus areas of any organisation.

Along with Everest trekking, scuba diving and sandboarding are upcoming activities in your calendar. Seeing your next set of events, we can easily label this year’s theme as–adventure sports.

IMPLEMENTING AGILE PRACTICES

We have tried to present a rapid-fire intro of key agile structures. Teams can easily experience improved efficiency by practising these agile frameworks in daily operations. Our enterprise-grade project management tool, Quickscrum seamlessly collabs advantages of two agile frameworks, Scrum and Kanban. It enables teams to adapt and implement their unique work structures for enhanced outcomes.