Every organization, regardless of size, has encountered a single piece of work that was too large to be consumed in a single iteration. In agile software development, this is often referred to as an epic level story. The epic is simply a very large story that requires some level of breakdown into smaller stories in order for the work to be consumed by the team in a single iteration. Each individual story ties back to its parent epic-level story via a hierarchical relationship, and is worked on independently. Each story contains tasks and tests that are associated and expected to be delivered within a single iteration.