Epic vs story vs task: what's the difference?
Epics, stories and tasks are the three sizes of work most agile teams use. Here's how to tell them apart and keep them useful.
Updated
Definition
An epic is a large body of work that delivers part of a milestone. A user story is a sprint-sized piece of an epic, written from the user's point of view. A task is a technical step inside a story that doesn't deliver value to a user on its own.
What it is in practice
The three levels answer different questions. The epic answers "what capability are we delivering, and for which milestone?" and usually spans several sprints. The story answers "what can a user do now that they couldn't before?" and fits in one sprint. The task answers "what does an engineer need to do next?" and might take hours.
Stories are where value shows up, so they are written for the user: "As a team lead, I want to…, so that…", with acceptance criteria that say when it's done. Tasks are written for the team and can be as technical as needed.
Keeping the levels distinct is what makes progress honest. When all the stories in an epic are done, users have the capability. When all the tasks in a story are done, the story can be tested.
An example from Pulse Analytics
In the Meridian Labs demo, Self-serve dashboards is a Pulse Analytics milestone. An epic under it covers dashboard sharing. "Share a dashboard with a team" is a user story inside that epic: a team lead can share, and the team can open the dashboard. Adding the permission check and writing the share notification are tasks inside the story. None of them helps a user alone; together, they finish the story.
Common mistakes
- Writing technical tasks as stories, so the backlog is full of "stories" no user would recognise.
- Epics that never end, because they describe a theme instead of a deliverable.
- Stories too big for a sprint. If it can't be finished in one, split it.
- Epics with no milestone or goal above them, so nobody can say why they matter.
How Ondule handles this
In Ondule, epics sit under milestones and objectives, issues sit under epics and can have subtasks, so each piece of work shows the goal it serves.
Questions
- Is an epic bigger than a user story?
- Yes. An epic contains several user stories and usually takes several sprints.
- Do tasks get story points?
- Usually not. Most teams estimate the story and use tasks to plan the steps inside it.
- What sits above an epic?
- A milestone or release, and above that, the objective the work is meant to move.