What is Epic User Stories

Large organizations often describe IT needs in terms of services. IT governance mechanisms ensure investments lead to systems aligned with the long-term objectives. This business and IT alignment is often evaluated at the early stages when a service development decision needs to be taken. Evaluating such an alignment nevertheless requires knowledge and details on the tasks, activities, and requirements that the service is supposed to support. This is incompatible with agile development principles that prescribe to focus on an ad-hoc design built during a sprint. The latter indeed uses an operational approach where value delivered to stakeholders is the driver. This chapter advocates that investment decisions based on (coarse-grained) services is reconcilable with their agile development. It proposes Agile-MoDrIGo, a model-driven IT governance framework using services as scope elements and relying on agile to determine run-time behavior. To this end, the framework uses parallel top-down and bottom-up approaches based on conceptual models where integration is ensured by a middle layer.