what's an epic

[Luciano Fagundes]

Steve

The documentation below should helps to clarify your question regarding an Epic on JIRA Agile perspective. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Working+with+Epics

Cheers

L.F

[Brian Ross]

To different people it means different things:

It can be a User Story that is planned to go across multiple iterations or sprints.

It can be a User Story that is more of a working theory on how something should work, and the User Stories under it are working towards that theory.

The site http://scrummethodology.com/scrum-epics/  defines it as "What happens when a story includes too many unknowns to tell just how big it is? Or what if the story’s requirements are known, but its effort is too huge to complete in a single sprint? We call these stories “epics.” If an item require more than a quarter of a Sprint to complete, it’s probably an epic. "

How your team defines Epics will determine how you use and work them.