Themes in Agile

The concept of the theme is not necessarily an integral part of an agile delivery process. Themes in agile software development are for grouping stories around… a theme. For example, all stories of an identity management module could be grouped together. This way themes provide an alternative grouping to epics, thus multiple views of the requirement set can exists simultaneously.

In Scrum, if the concept of the sprint goal is taken seriously, themes can help organizing sprints around coherent Sprint Goals. However, the apparent disadvantage of this solution is the lack of prioritization across themes. Consequently, this bears the risk of delivering low priority stories.

Some methodologies may give a more specific definition for ‘theme’, ‘feature’ and ‘epic’. It is always good to keep in mind that agile is not a unified methodology. Its colorful history gave room for a great number of concepts, systems, frameworks, methodologies and ideas.

What are your thoughts?

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