Umbrella Tickets

Umbrella tickets (or Epics in agile speak) are over arching tickets which contain multiple stages. Sometime you may feel it is beneficial for you or the reviewer to split a ticket which has been agreed in backlog prep into multiple smaller tickets; in this case you create an umbrella ticket. These can exist as actual tickets, but can also be raft tickets on the Program Increment (PI) board.

On the PI Board

• These will have a classification of Project/Feature, and will have a whole number for the PI Priority.
• The smaller tickets will have a classification of To do for a Project/Feature, and will have a decimal value for the PI Priority. The number for the decimal point is the priority for the umbrella ticket, and the number after is the priority in relation to the other tickets underneath that umbrella.

Case 1 Before working on an original ticket it is clear it should be split

• Create a smaller ticket it should be named <TICKET NUMBER>-1: <Ticket purpose>
• Estimate the ticket
• Assign the ticket to yourself
• Reference the ticket in the original ticket and reduce its estimate by the estimate of this ticket. If this makes the ticket negative by more than 1 then talk about it with a member of the team.
• Work on the ticket as if it were a normal ticket

Case 2 After working on a ticket for a while you want to spin out a new ticket

• Create the umbrella ticket with the original estimate of the ticket minus the estimate of the present ticket. If this makes the ticket negative by more than 1 then talk about it with a member of the team.
• Name this ticket the same as the original
• Rename the original tickets as <TICKET NUMBER>-1: <Ticket purpose>
• Set the estimate on the original ticket
• Spin out any new tickets as in case 1