Example epics and themes for website project

Question

Can there be any crossover between themes and the epics/stories inside them.

For example, i think 'Frontend' would make a good theme for a website project. However some stories within this theme might belong to other themes i.e.

Frontend (theme)
    - Homepage (epic)
        - Carousel (story)
            - Backend development to load carousel images (task)
            - Layout and styling of carousel (task)

Obviously the backend task stands out as being in the wrong place. However, having the frontend theme would mean that the backend task needs to go into another hierarchy, right?

Backend (theme)
    - Homepage (epic)
        - Carousel (story)
            - Backend development to load carousel images (task)

and

Frontend (theme)
    - Homepage (epic)
        - Carousel (story)
            - Layout and styling of carousel (task)

Messy.

How would this normally be structured?

Is homepage the the theme or still an epic but no theme?

Answer 1

Start from the business goals you want to accomplish

Story, epic and theme are not precise terms that are defined in a standard. If you search the Scrum Guide, you won't find any reference to these terms.

See Mike Cohn's blog in response to similar questions - Story, epic and theme are merely terms we use to help simplify some discussions Scrum teams have.

More importantly, you seem to be starting with an internal techie view of the project. You should start with what your site is intended to accomplish. As an example, let us say you have the following business goals:

1. Get visitors to sign up for your email Newsletter.
2. Get visitors to fill out a lead generation form to download a white paper.
3. Get visitors to share your web site content on social media.

Each of these can be written as an epic. Then each epic can be decomposed into stories.

Themes, typically, are not part of this hierarchy. Let us say you apply some tags for your stories for convenience of discussing them together. You can think of a theme as all stories that have a common tag. For example, 'security' can be thought of as a theme. Then you can say something like, "Security is important, but I don't want to spend more than 20% of my project budget on security."

Answer 2

I think you are mixing the What with the How (solution)

Backend (theme) - this is going into solution - Homepage (epic) - this is a requirement

Website - Theme Homepage - Epic/Feature Carousel - Epic/Feature (large Story) - to be broken down into further smaller stories Adminpage - Epic/Feature (large Story) - to be broken down into further smaller stories

Backend and front end development would form part of your stories and tasks as they are part of the end delivery.

Hope this makes sense.