Game Epic
Melisa Niederhaus
Summary: An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called user stories) based on the needs/requests of customers or end-users. Epics are an important practice for agile and DevOps teams.
Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can actually get done and you can continue to ship value to your customers on a regular basis. Epics help teams break their work down, while continuing to work towards a bigger goal.
Maintaining agility when organizing large tasks, like epics, is no small task (pun intended). Learning how epics relate to healthy agile and DevOps best practices is an essential skill no matter the size of your organization.
From our example above, a theme would be increasing space shuttle launches, the roadmap would track towards increasing launches from 3 per quarter to 4, the initiatives would be to drive down costs and increase ticket sales, and each epic would roll up into the initiatives.
Breaking down an epic into more practical stories helps in understanding a project and maintaining momentum, but it can be a daunting task for the uninitiated. There is no one-size-fits all solution for creating stories from an epic, but there are a lot of good options to consider:
Burndown charts can be used to visualize epics, and serve to keep teams motivated and the executive stakeholders informed. A good epic burndown chart is where the agility of the organization really shines.
An epic burndown chart shows the actual and estimated amount of work to be done in a sprint or epic. The horizontal x-axis in a burndown chart indicates time, and the vertical y-axis indicates stories or issues.
Use a burndown chart to track the total work remaining and to project the likelihood of achieving the sprint goal. By tracking the remaining work throughout the iteration, a team can manage its progress and respond accordingly.
By monitoring a burndown chart, it becomes clear how the team is progressing and where the blockers are. Having these data points clearly visible keeps everyone on the same page and facilitates an open conversation about the evolution of the product and completion forecasts. Not to mention that transparency builds trust!
Once you have mastered the art of creating epics and stories, you might want to go one further and optimize using automation. Here are three of the most common automation rules used for sprints in Jira.
Epics are not the absolute foundation of an agile program, but they are the practical drivers for most agile and DevOps teams. Understanding where they fit into a healthy agile program creates context for your work, while breaking them down into stories creates momentum.
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.[1]
In ancient Greek, 'epic' could refer to all poetry in dactylic hexameter (epea), which included not only Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, and the strange theological verses attributed to Orpheus. Later tradition, however, has restricted the term 'epic' to heroic epic, as described in this article.
Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics, such as those of Homer, were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to the epic in their performances. Later writers like Virgil, Apollonius of Rhodes, Dante, Cames, and Milton adopted and adapted Homer's style and subject matter, but used devices available only to those who write.
The first epics were products of preliterate societies and oral history poetic traditions.[citation needed] Oral tradition was used alongside written scriptures to communicate and facilitate the spread of culture.[10]In these traditions, poetry is transmitted to the audience and from performer to performer by purely oral means. Early 20th-century study of living oral epic traditions in the Balkans by Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated the paratactic model used for composing these poems. What they demonstrated was that oral epics tend to be constructed in short episodes, each of equal status, interest and importance. This facilitates memorization, as the poet is recalling each episode in turn and using the completed episodes to recreate the entire epic as he performs it. Parry and Lord also contend that the most likely source for written texts of the epics of Homer was dictation from an oral performance.
Milman Parry and Albert Lord have argued that the Homeric epics, the earliest works of Western literature, were fundamentally an oral poetic form. These works form the basis of the epic genre in Western literature. Nearly all of Western epic (including Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy) self-consciously presents itself as a continuation of the tradition begun by these poems.
The hero generally participates in a cyclical journey or quest, faces adversaries that try to defeat them in their journey, and returns home significantly transformed by their journey. The epic hero illustrates traits, performs deeds, and exemplifies certain morals that are valued by the society the epic originates from. Many epic heroes are recurring characters in the legends of their native cultures.
Classical epic poetry recounts a journey, either physical (as typified by Odysseus in the Odyssey) or mental (as typified by Achilles in the Iliad) or both.[16] Epics also tend to highlight cultural norms and to define or call into question cultural values, particularly as they pertain to heroism.[16]
These conventions are largely restricted to European classical culture and its imitators. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, or the Bhagavata Purana do not contain such elements, nor do early medieval Western epics that are not strongly shaped by the classical traditions, such as the Chanson de Roland or the Poem of the Cid.
Narrative opens "in the middle of things", with the hero at his lowest point. Usually flashbacks show earlier portions of the story. For example, the Iliad does not tell the entire story of the Trojan War, starting with the judgment of Paris, but instead opens abruptly on the rage of Achilles and its immediate causes. So too, Orlando Furioso is not a complete biography of Roland, but picks up from the plot of Orlando Innamorato, which in turn presupposes a knowledge of the romance and oral traditions.
Epic catalogues and genealogies are given, called enumeratio. These long lists of objects, places, and people place the finite action of the epic within a broader, universal context, such as the catalog of ships. Often, the poet is also paying homage to the ancestors of audience members. Examples:
Ancient Sumerian epic poems did not use any kind of poetic meter and lines did not have consistent lengths;[22]instead, Sumerian poems derived their rhythm solely through constant repetition and parallelism, with subtle variations between lines.[22]Indo-European epic poetry, by contrast, usually places strong emphasis on the importance of line consistency and poetic meter.[22] Ancient Greek epics were composed in dactylic hexameter.[23]Very early Latin epicists, such Livius Andronicus and Gnaeus Naevius, used Saturnian meter. By the time of Ennius, however, Latin poets had adopted dactylic hexameter.
Old English, German and Norse poems were written in alliterative verse,[24]usually without rhyme. The alliterative form can be seen in the Old English "Finnsburg Fragment" (alliterated sounds are in bold):
While the above classical and Germanic forms would be considered stichic, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese long poems favored stanzaic forms, usually written in terza rima[27]or especially ottava rima.[28]Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. An example is found in the first lines of the Divine Comedy by Dante, who originated the form:
Balto-Finnic (e.g. Estonian, Finnish, Karelian) folk poetry uses a form of trochaic tetrameter that has been called the Kalevala meter. The Finnish and Estonian national epics, Kalevala and Kalevipoeg, are both written in this meter. The meter is thought to have originated during the Proto-Finnic period.[37]
A related type of poetry is the epyllion (plural: epyllia), a brief narrative poem with a romantic or mythological theme. The term, which means "little epic", came into use in the nineteenth century. It refers primarily to the erudite, shorter hexameter poems of the Hellenistic period and the similar works composed at Rome from the age of the neoterics; to a lesser degree, the term includes some poems of the English Renaissance, particularly those influenced by Ovid.[38]The most famous example of classical epyllion is perhaps Catullus 64.
Long poetic narratives that do not fit the traditional European definition of the heroic epic are sometimes known as folk epics. Indian folk epics have been investigated by Lauri Honko (1998),[39] Brenda Beck (1982) [40] and John Smith, amongst others. Folk epics are an important part of community identities. For example, in Egypt, the folk genre known as al-sira relates the saga of the Hilālī tribe and their migrations across the Middle East and north Africa, see Bridget Connelly (1986).[41] In India, folk epics reflect the caste system of Indian society and the life of the lower levels of society, such as cobblers and shepherds, see C.N. Ramachandran, "Ambivalence and Angst: A Note on Indian folk epics," in Lauri Honko (2002. p. 295).[42] Some Indian oral epics feature strong women who actively pursue personal freedom in their choice of a romantic partner (Stuart, Claus, Flueckiger and Wadley, eds, 1989, p. 5).[43] Japanese traditional performed narratives were sung by blind singers. One of the most famous, The Tale of the Heike, deals with historical wars and had a ritual function to placate the souls of the dead (Tokita 2015, p. 7).[44] A variety of epic forms are found in Africa. Some have a linear, unified style while others have a more cyclical, episodic style (Barber 2007, p. 50).[45] People in the rice cultivation zones of south China sang long narrative songs about the origin of rice growing, rebel heroes, and transgressive love affairs (McLaren 2022).[46] The borderland ethnic populations of China sang heroic epics, such as the Epic of King Gesar of the Mongols, and the creation-myth epics of the Yao people of south China.[47]
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