Table of Contents
If you have ever developed any software or are just planning on doing so, chances are that you’ve heard the words “epic” and “user story”. You’ve likely also seen epics and user stories in a budget estimation received from an IT outsourcing company, in case you’ve ever requested such. This is because both terms are pretty popular in the tech world since coding teams and other development process participants use them quite often.
The problem, however, is that different people usually mean different things when they talk about epics and user stories. Nothing is engraved in stone, and teams tend to adopt terminology to what is convenient for them. The bad news is that such a state of affairs may lead to some misunderstandings between developers and clients, which is a rather unfortunate outcome.
In this article, we’ll try to sort things out and explain what Epic is vs what a user story is based on our practical experience. To make it even clearer, we’ll also illustrate everything with examples and the processes we have developed here at Altamira.
Scrum methodology: a brief Overview
Epics and user stories are mostly used by development teams that follow the Agile approach to software development. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll focus only on Scrum rules and terminology since it’s the most widespread project management methodology under the Agile umbrella.
Want to get a better understanding of Scrum and discover why it is so good? Check out this article right away.
In Scrum, the development process is divided into sprints. That is, the project development is broken up into components of short periods of time during which a development team should create a potentially releasable feature set that is called an “increment”. Every increment usually consists of several product backlog items (or PBIS). A product backlog item is a general term for all the product features, functions, enhancements, etc., to be developed by the team. In other words, PBIS is a building block outlining the scope of work for a coding team. So, how does all this apply to user stories and epics? Let’s take a closer look and discover.
Agile methodology and stakeholder engagement
Engaging stakeholders in Agile requires clear communication of both the big picture and the smaller steps that lead there. Epics help teams align with long-term goals, while user stories break those goals into actionable tasks that stakeholders can weigh in on more frequently.
Hierarchy and organisation in the Agile framework
Agile organises work from broad to specific. At the top, epics capture strategic initiatives. These are broken down into user stories—smaller, manageable units that keep teams focused and progress visible.
Transparency and a structured framework in Agile
The structured relationship between epics and user stories offers a practical way to stay transparent about what’s being built and why. Epics clarify goals upfront; user stories track the work that brings them to life.
Estimating and planning in Agile processes
Epics, due to their size and scope, require long-term planning and estimation, often across several sprints. User stories, being more specific, are easier to estimate and prioritise in sprint planning sessions.
Timeframe and completion in Agile projects
Because of their complexity, epics typically unfold over multiple sprints. User stories, however, are scoped to be completed within a sprint, allowing for steady progress and frequent delivery of working features.
Scenarios and tasks in Agile planning
Agile planning often begins with high-level scenarios captured in epics. These are later broken down into user stories that reflect specific tasks or user flows, making them easier to prioritise and implement.
What is an Epic?
The Official Scrum Guide defines neither the term “epic” nor “user story”. However, these terms are used in any one Agile methodology development.
Basically, an epic is one big piece of product functionality. Usually, it is too big to be completed in one sprint and should be split up into smaller bodies of work. For instance, an epic may constitute the pieces of code that are responsible for registration & authorisation, authentication, user profile, etc. As simple as that.
The functionality of a product is decomposed into epics in order to estimate the time and budget outlay required to complete the aggregate project, organise the work of a coding team, and identify the chunks that are of the highest priority. It’s also more convenient to discuss the product at a high level, for example, with stakeholders with no technical background, by looking at it as a set of epics. It is also easier to track progress and control the overall development process if you know what epics you are working on and how much time the overall implementation of the features will take.
Strategic planning and resource allocation
Because epics live on the product roadmap and span multiple teams or timeframes, they often demand careful resource planning. Their development may call for cross-functional collaboration and dedicated project management support.
Progress tracking and manageable workloads
Epics help track long-term progress, while user stories allow teams to manage daily workloads. By structuring work this way, teams can stay aligned on goals without losing sight of the details.
Incremental value delivery and complexity management
Breaking epics into smaller user stories allows teams to deliver incremental value without being overwhelmed by complexity. This approach also enables more frequent testing, feedback, and course correction.
Planning and execution of Epics
Building out an epic is not a casual task. It often involves early-stage roadmap inclusion, coordination across teams, and a more structured approach to planning and tracking than what’s needed for individual stories.
Communication and collaboration for Epics
Because epics often involve multiple interdependent stories, they encourage cross-team communication and collaboration. They also serve as a shared reference point for aligning stakeholders and developers.
Example of epics
Now we would like to show you some examples of epics and how exactly they appear in the project management flow. Let’s imagine we are developing a custom corporate website for a company where workers and users need to have different levels of website access. As we’ve already established, epic represents a part of the development project, being responsible for the development of a particular web app function. So the epics for the development of a website could be divided into creating sprints as follows:
Log in;
Registration;
User profile;
Website;
Services;
Order management.
Thus, the epic is in and of itself a voluminous piece of software that needs to be further subdivided into smaller components that are called user stories and will carry detailed descriptions of each step a user will have to take to start using a website.
What is a User Story?
A user story (or just a “story”) is a specific task within an epic. For instance, we may have such user stories as “Sign Up with Email”, “Sign Up with Facebook or Google”, “Log In with Email”, “Log In with Facebook or Google”, “Forgot Password”, and “Log out” in the broad epic that can be called “Registration & Authentication”. So to create user stories, we just need to look at a particular epic more scrupulously and determine exactly what may be included in it.
It’s also worth mentioning that if there are several types of users for one feature, for example, logging in as a user and logging in as an admin, separate stories should be created and devised for each of the roles. Ideally, all user stories have to be written in a standard format that goes as follows: Using consistent wording is important because the above template allows you to simultaneously focus on the end-user and provide programmers with the guidelines on the features to be developed.
You may wonder why not just break the scope of work down into stories from the very beginning, skipping the epics? Well, it’s a matter of efficiency. First of all, it would be quite challenging to properly define the list of stories if there were no epics. And, secondly, without epics, it’s quite hard to see the big picture. As a result, it becomes almost impossible to properly estimate and prioritise the work since the only thing we can see is an endless list of relatively small tasks that somehow have to be logically linked and connected.
Flexibility and prioritisation in user stories
User stories are designed to be lightweight and adaptable. This makes it easier to shift priorities as new information comes in, keeping the team responsive without disrupting broader plans tied to epics.
Task management and a user-centric approach
User stories help teams stay grounded in what users actually need. They’re task-oriented, but always connected back to a user’s goal or problem, ensuring that development stays focused on delivering value.
Sprint planning and acceptance criteria
User stories are the backbone of sprint planning. They’re small enough to estimate, prioritise, and commit to in short cycles. Clear acceptance criteria help ensure everyone’s on the same page about when a story is truly done.
Use case and story grooming techniques
Story grooming involves refining user stories to make them ready for development. This includes breaking down epics, clarifying goals, and ensuring alignment with user needs and overall project direction.
BDD and Gherkin in user story development
Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Gherkin syntax are often used to express user stories in a clear, testable format. This approach ties story outcomes to user behaviour, improving communication between developers and testers.
Example of user stories
A user story is one of the elements of an epic that splits one epic into several consistent steps that describe what website users will see on a screen and what action they will be asked to perform, considering the acceptance criteria. To show it with an example, let’s take a common example that is present in many software products – registration. The stories that could be added to this epic are the following:
Sign up – as an unregistered user, I want to have an opportunity to “Sign Up” for the website in order to get access to its functionality.
Email verification – as a user completing registration, I will be tasked with verifying the email address provided in order to prove that the email address provided in fact belongs to me.
Log in – as a registered user, I want to have the ability to “Log In” to my account in order to get access to the website options.
Forgot password – as an unregistered user, I want to have an option to change my password in case I forgot it or lost it, or otherwise.
Log out – as an authenticated user, I want to have the option to “Log Out” of the account in an attempt to keep my account private and safe.
We have described a basic registration process and its surrounding elements without entering/specifying the types of buttons, acceptance criteria, field titles, and ways of validation.
What is the difference between an epic and a user story?
Taking into account the definition of an epic and a user story, we have figured out that there is no significant difference between these two components of the software project, as they correlate to each other. Epic is the larger part that is charged for a certain app feature (we mentioned some examples above), while the user story is the detailed description of how this feature will function within the system and what actions or tasks should be done to make it work correctly.
Granularity in Epics vs user stories
Epics are broad in scope, often spanning many sprints. User stories, in contrast, are granular and ready for implementation. This distinction helps teams plan work at the right level of detail, depending on the stage of the project.
Theme grouping and feature definition
Epics group related user stories under a common goal or feature area, helping teams manage dependencies. This structure makes it easier to define features in context and coordinate work across multiple stories.
Delivering value through Epics and user stories
While user stories focus on specific user needs, epics keep the broader value proposition in sight. Together, they help teams deliver functionality that’s both meaningful and aligned with long-term goals.
What is a Theme?
The theme is used to structure user stories into appropriate groups that are related to one another. Each themed group of user stories is responsible for one feature or channel that is split into several different parts and applies different abilities and acceptance criteria. Each user story in this case is a separate activity with its own goals and tasks, however, it is still the single theme. Themes can intertwine when the user story can be related to different themes, meaning one user story can be used in several channels.
What is Initiative?
Usually, under initiatives, we understand a collection of several epics that are aimed at achieving one common goal. Initiatives can collect epics of different teams to address more holistic and complex goals than any of the separate epics can do themselves. Epics imply smaller amounts of jobs that can be completed within a month or a couple of months. And initiatives can take several months and even a year to complete. Check out the picture below to get a better understanding of the initiative’s nature.
How do the developers work with epics and user stories?
In the Scrum team, the responsibility of writing epics and user stories lies with the Product Owner. He or she is a person who determines what has to be developed and in what sequence. But, of course, a Product Owner doesn’t work in isolation. To turn stakeholders’ ideas into epics and user stories, the Product Owner constantly communicates and coordinates with the development team.
For the development team, all user stories that are to be developed in one sprint are placed on a “to-do list”. Or, using the Scrum terminology, we may say that user stories are product backlog items that all together constitute one increment, i.e., a potentially shippable piece of software to be developed within a sprint.
During one sprint, developers can work on user stories belonging to different epics. Everything depends on prioritisation and team velocity, i.e. the number of stories a team is capable of completing in one sprint.
?Useful Info
Want to understand the main principles of Scrum and how it works? Then read our article related to it.
How do we use epics and user stories for estimation?
As we mentioned earlier, besides being useful for organising the team’s work, epics and user stories also help to calculate the budget for a project. This is because breaking the functionality down into pieces and estimating each of them separately makes the whole process much easier and much more transparent.
Here’s what the estimation process looks like at Altamira:
In the estimation document provided to a client, we mention the number of hours our specialists need to complete a user story. For instance, let’s say a team has to develop a “Log In with Facebook” feature for ios, Android, and the web. The estimation for it might contain the following information:
| Job role | Required working time |
|---|---|
| Product Owner | 1-2 hrs |
| Android front-end developer | 4-5 hrs |
| iOS front-end developer | 3-4 hrs |
| Web/API developer | 4-6 hrs |
What to consider when choosing a Development Team?
Commonly, software development companies offer a similar range of services and project development cycle.
The project development process is usually split into several consecutive parts:
determining the business objectives and project value for your company;
creating a list with specifications – detailed description of product requirements and a plan on how to execute on them;
design layout – initial visualisation of your future product before making all intended product features functional;
turning the design layout into reality – writing code where each sprint is responsible for a particular function of your solution;
providing testing of your solution to monitor it in action and reveal any bugs and errors to fix them before the official release;
implementing it into your business workflows if it is a new solution, and deployment of an updated version in case the developers’ team was tasked with modifying an existing software within your company;
a maintenance program that implies supporting your product after deployment and providing improvements following your company’s demands, and the constant change and evolution of tech trends that are used for developing solutions in your industry.
We also recommend having a look at the maintenance packages that Altamira offers to its clients and learn which maintenance plan would be appropriate for your software project.
In addition to the development flow we described above, the software development company you are partnering with should offer a full and transparent package of documents where all project details will be written, approved, and signed by both sides.
We recommend acting responsibly when choosing the development team and learning about each specialist who will be involved in your project. Particularly, we advise you to check the following options:
how long have all of the specialists been working in the software development industry, and how long have they been with the development company?
learn about the experience, including the technical stack, previous projects, their success after release, industries, etc.
check out LinkedIn profiles to find out more about team members’ skills, proven experience in previous software development companies, reviews, and other activities;
meet all team members in person and figure out the responsibilities and tasks of each specialist.
We are ready to provide you with all required information about our workflow with clients, clear documentation, get you acquainted with every professional who is going to work with your project as we know how vital it is to keep you informed about each development stage and take into account your feedback to know if we are moving in the right direction.
Bottom line
In simple words, the main difference between a user story and an epic lies in the scale of the view. The user story is the tiniest piece of product functionality. A big user story that may be decomposed into a set of smaller user stories is epic. There are two main purposes of having two terms that sound so similar. First, it’s more convenient to discuss a product on different levels (i.e. stakeholders – product owner; product owner – coding team; developers – developers). And secondly, it helps to optimise the development process. We hope you found this article helpful. But if you still feel confused, don’t worry at all. Our expert team would be happy to answer all of your questions.
FAQ
All technical documentation, including epics, user stories, and Project Vision documents, is written by a professional Business Analyst. This person conducts research on your business niche, clarifies your business needs, explores your competitors, and then starts writing tech documentation.
There is no exact number because every project is different. But we would recommend adding no more than 10-15 user stories to an epic. This will allow us to complete it within 3 months and proceed with other development stages.
Without them, it will be harder to develop your project. So if you want to prioritise tasks easily, monitor how the development is going and how much progress is made, then you need to pay special attention to writing formulated epics and user stories.
Epics should contain project, technical, and design requirements. Also, there should be an introduction explaining what and why something should be added to your project, and what metrics of your business you want to improve.
Epics and user stories evolved because teams needed a clearer way to manage complex work. Traditional project specs were often too rigid or too detailed upfront, making it a challenge to adapt to change. Agile brought a shift toward smaller, iterative planning, and with that came the need to break work down into manageable pieces. Epics and user stories offered a way to stay focused on what matters—delivering value—without getting bogged down in overly technical plans from day one.
Epics give you the big picture. They outline larger goals or themes that guide a project, especially when the work spans multiple sprints or teams. While user stories cover specific tasks or features, epics help keep everything aligned with a broader objective. They’re not meant to describe every detail—instead, they provide context, so teams know where their efforts are headed and how each piece fits into the whole.