Managing Epic Stories

An interesting discussion over on the ScrumDevelopment group recently dealt with managing "Epic" user stories. This is something we're trying to deal with at my job. Project Management seems to want to track the "parent" story so they can tell when the whole chunk of functionality is done.

The consensus on ScrumDevelopment seems to be that once you break an epic into chewable sized pieces, you get rid of the epic. Updating it just adds more overhead that you don't really need to track. You can look at the individual stories and see what functionality is done. The other main thought is that you won't necessarily implement all of the sub-stories of an epic at the same time. Some of the pieces may never get implemented, simply because they didn't hold much business value.

Link to the thread:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/messages/27490?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1

Videos

I had watched Ken Schwaber's Google Techtalk a while back, but since I'm now at a company that's trying to be mostly Scrum, I figure it's time to watch it again.

Scrum et al.

While looking in that channel I found a couple of other videos that look interesting:

Agile Testing and Scrum Tuning.

I'll post thoughts on these once I get a chance to watch them.