Date: 2022-04-14
Accepted
It took a lot of work during alpha to develop and iterate epics that were useful for the team. While they were quite useful during alpha, we probably want to avoid using riskiest assumptions as our private beta epics, as we have a much clearer idea of what platform and service we’re building.
To make our private beta epics useful, it’s important to acknowledge that we’re not only writing our epics, but also making a choice about what kind of epics we want to use.
We discussed three different types of epics we could use during private beta:
- An epic is a phase of our proposed user journey
- An epic is a group of complementary user stories that together should allow us to test a specific form with a partner
- An epic is a themed group of user stories that when successfully delivered, offer a new, improved or ongoing capability
We discussed these options in more detail.
We decided to start with epic type 2, "An epic is a group of complementary user stories that together should allow us to test a specific form with a partner".
We also recognised that after the first few forms have been created or published during private beta, we are likely to want to bring in epics that fit with epic type 1. So we should review this decision at this later point.
Our first epic is called, "Amend my personal details on my redundancy claim". Once we’ve agreed which other specific document-based forms we’ll use with our partners to test GOV.UK Forms, we’ll create more epics with the necessary user stories we need to design, build and test.