Will Epic Story Points be reflected on the Release Burndown Report?

[Lena Boiser]

When doing a Release Planning with a team, it's not always the case that we have all User Stories ready. Most of the time, we only have the Epics and in the initial Release Planning, we size the Epics. We breakdown the Epics that we think should be tackled first and estimate work that is good for at least 3 sprints. We then work on refining the remaining epics and fleshing out the user stories in Backlog refinement sessions. 

Will I still be able to generate a Release Burndown chart (not Epic burndown) even with only Epics sized? How does the Release burndown calculate when both the Epic and its stories are sized/estimated? 

[Stuart Haslam]

We have exactly the same issue. I would love to know if there's a good solution to this because I've been unable to find one.

What we generally do is create a single story within the epic, put the story point estimate for the epic in that one story, then as we work through the epic we split that one story. This kind of works but it's a bit messy.

[Lena Boiser]

I tried to simulate this using a test project. The Release Burndown includes story point estimates for Epics. So I guess, the approach will be to size the Epic during initial release planning, but as we size the stories under the Epic, we should remove the Epic story point so only the User Stories under that Epic will be counted on the Release Burndown.