Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Review Epics with Stakeholders

In many parts of the agile world, stakeholders are the ones who are primarily responsible for writing epics¹⁷ and user stories. However, in the enterprise application development world, with large numbers of customers for each product, this model doesn’t work. So what we suggest to our teams is that sales, marketing, product management, and even executives bring to the table their understanding of the “big features” that customers want. We then have a small group of folks from the team (generally the product owner, product architect, lead developer, lead tester, and lead writer) create epics out of the desired features. After they do this, we suggest that the epics be reviewed with a representative set of customers ...