A
Acceptance Criteria is a set of statements that describes the conditions a software product or a project deliverable must satisfy in order for the User Story to be accepted by a Product Owner, user, customer, or other stakeholder.
Acceptance Criteria is specific to a single PBI, whereas Definition of Done applies to all PBIs.
Agile: Agile means “incremental, allowing teams to develop projects in small increments. Scrum is one of the many types of agile methodology, known for breaking projects down into sizable chunks called “sprints.” Agile scrum methodology is good for businesses that need to finish specific projects quickly.
Agile Manifesto: is a document that identifies four key values and 12 principles that its authors believe software developers should use to guide their work.
Artefact: information that a scrum team and stakeholders use to detail the product being developed, actions to produce it, and the actions performed during the project. The main agile scrum artefacts are product backlog, sprint backlog, and increments.
B
Burn-down Chart: a chart which shows the amount of work which is thought to remain in a backlog. Time is shown on the horizontal axis and work remaining on the vertical axis. As time progresses and items are drawn from the backlog and completed, a plot line showing work remaining may be expected to fall. The amount of work may be assessed in any of several ways such as user story points or task hours. Work remaining in Sprint Backlogs and Product Backlogs may be communicated by means of a burn-down chart.
Burn-up Chart: a chart which shows the amount of work which has been completed. Time is shown on the horizontal axis and work completed on the vertical axis. As time progresses and items are drawn from the backlog and completed, a plot line showing the work done may be expected to rise. The amount of work may be assessed in any of several ways such as user story points or task hours. The amount of work considered to be in-scope may also be plotted as a line; the burn-up can be expected to approach this line as work is completed.
Business Value
C
Co-located Scrum teams are teams where all members are physically present in the same office or workspace. This traditional setup offers several advantages for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Coach:
- Agile Coach – Among agilists, the word “coach” is frequently used to describe the role of an “Agile Coach.” This is someone who uses agile approaches to help people and teams reach their objectives or overcome challenges. An Agile Coach doesn’t just coach per se; they also advise, lead, facilitate and teach the teams they are helping.
- To describe the discipline of “coaching.” Informally speaking, someone who coaches provides guidance to help others achieve their professional or personal goals. There are also professional organizations that provide prescribed courses of study to become a certified coach. These organizations have formal definitions of what coaching entails.
Coherent/Coherence: The quality of the relationship between certain Product Backlog items which may make them worthy of consideration as a whole. See also: Sprint Goal.
Continuous Delivery: a software delivery practice similar to Continuous Deployment except a human action is required to promote changes into a subsequent environment along the pipeline.
Continuous Integration: agile software development practice popularized by Extreme Programming in which newly checked-in code is built, integrated and tested frequently, generally multiple times a day.
Cross-functional: characteristic of a team holding that all the skills required to successfully produce a releasable Increment in a Sprint are available within the team, where releasable refers to making the software available in production.
D
Daily Scrum: Scrum Event that is a 15-minute time-boxed event held each day for the Developers. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Developers plan work for the next 24 hours. This optimises team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity.
Definition of Done: is a formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality measures required for the product. The moment a Product Backlog item meets the Definition of Done, an Increment is born. The Definition of Done creates transparency by providing everyone a shared understanding of what work was completed as part of the Increment. If a Product Backlog item does not meet the Definition of Done, it cannot be released or even presented at the Sprint Review.
Definition of Ready:
Developer: any member of a Scrum Team that is committed to creating any aspect of a usable Increment each Sprint regardless of technical, functional or other specialty.
E
Emergence: the process of the coming into existence or prominence of new facts or new knowledge of a fact, or knowledge of a fact becoming visible unexpectedly.
Empiricism: the philosophy that all knowledge originates in experience and observations. It’s a cornerstone of the scientific method and underlies much of modern science and medicine. In the context of Scrum, empiricism refers to the idea that solving complex problems, or doing complex work, can only be done using an exploratory process rather than relying on predetermined plans.
Engineering standards: a shared set of development and technology standards that Developers apply to create releasable Increments of software.
Evidence-Based Management is a framework organisations can use to help them measure, manage, and increase the value they derive from their product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimizing investments.
Epic: a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories.
Extreme Programming: agile software development framework with an extreme focus on programming and taking engineering practices to an extreme in order to create and release high quality code. Highly complementary to the Scrum framework.
F
Facilitator: someone who helps a group of people understand and achieve their objectives by promoting collaboration, optimising the process and creating synergy within the team.
Feedback Loop is an integral to scrum development, enabling scrum teams to measure and track progress throughout each sprint. By incorporating scrum feedback loops into your organization’s agile process, you can ensure that all team members are on the same page and that any issues are identified and addressed quickly.
Forecast (of functionality): the selection of items from the Product Backlog Developers deems feasible for implementation in a Sprint.
I
Impediment: is anything that keeps the Team from getting work Done and that slows Velocity.
Increment: Scrum Artefact that defines the complete and valuable work produced by the Developers during a Sprint. The sum of all Increments form a product.
Iteration means a fixed period during which the team undertake some work – no commitment, no fix work.
INVEST: A good user story should be:
“I” ndependent (of all others)
“N” egotiable (not a specific contract for features)
“V” aluable (or vertical)
“E” stimable (to a good approximation)
“S” mall (so as to fit within an iteration)
“T” estable (in principle, even if there isn’t a test for it yet)
M
Manager: As simple as it sounds, managers “manage.” They concern themselves with the day-to-day operations of the business. Managers generally oversee people, processes or tasks, making sure that work is on-track. Management is generally an organizational role that comes with a level of authority. Teams are often compelled to follow the direction of their managers simply because of this organizational authority.
Minimum Viable Product: One practice to achieve Hypothesis Driven Development is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The MVP is the smallest implementation of our product or a feature which allows to learn more about how users will react to it or technical behaviour like performance
O
Outcome:
One-Piece Flow: On Scrum Teams, this means Stories don’t wait for people who have skills they need – the people are available when they’re needed.
Output:
P
Potentially Releasable Increment: the product increment must be high quality, well tested, and complete. But it does not necessarily need to be a cohesive set of functionality.
Product Backlog: A Scrum Artifact that consists of an ordered list of the work to be done in order to create, maintain and sustain a product. Managed by the Product Owner.
Product Backlog Refinement: the activity in a Sprint through which the Product Owner and the Developers add granularity to the Product Backlog.
Product Goal: The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define “what” will fulfill the Product Goal.
Product Owner: Role in Scrum accountable for maximizing the value of a product, primarily by incrementally managing and expressing business and functional expectations for a product to the Developers.
Product Vision: captures the shared understanding of the goal that is to be achieved with building the product. It is created by the Product Owner.
Prototyping gives everyone on a team a single idea to work from and is a far more effective way to communicate a designer’s intent than a group of static screenshots. For example, a well crafted prototype can show an entire team exactly how an “on hover” state in a design should work, rather than leaving this open to interpretation.
R
Ready is a shared understanding by the Product Owner and the Developers regarding the preferred level of description of Product Backlog items introduced at Sprint Planning.
Relative Estimation is used to determine how much effort is needed to complete the individual tasks of a project. Tasks or user stories are compared against similar, previously completed tasks.
Release reflects the features in the backlog to be worked on in the upcoming sprints and provides an approximate date for the release. The plan should include the responsibilities, resources, and activities needed for each release and their potential priority.
Release Planning: reflects the features in the backlog to be worked on in the upcoming sprints and provides an approximate date for the release.
S
Scaling Scrum is a phenomenon where multiple Scrum Teams work together to create a product. Adaptation of Scrum is a necessity for Product Development given that one of the biggest difficulties with scaling Scrum is the ability for multiple teams to deliver usable software within a Sprint.
Scrum: Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.
Scrum Board: a physical board to visualise information for and by the Scrum Team, often used to manage Sprint Backlog. Scrum boards are an optional implementation within Scrum to make information visible.
Scrum Master: Role within a Scrum Team accountable for guiding, coaching, teaching and assisting a Scrum Team and its environments in a proper understanding and use of Scrum.
Scrum of Scrums: is a scaled agile technique that offers a way to connect multiple teams who need to work together to deliver complex solutions.
Scrum Team: a self-managing team consisting of one Scrum Master, one Product Owner, and Developers.
Scrum Values: a set of fundamental values and qualities underpinning the Scrum framework; commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage.
Self-Managing: Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
Spike: is the name for a timeboxed user story or Task that is created in order to research a question or resolve a problem. Spikes focus on gathering information and finding answers to a questions, rather than producing a shippable product.
Sprint: Scrum Event that is time-boxed to one month or less, that serves as a container for the other Scrum events and activities. Sprints are done consecutively, without intermediate gaps.
Sprint Backlog: Scrum Artifact that provides an overview of the development work to realize a Sprint’s goal, typically a forecast of functionality and the work needed to deliver that functionality. Managed by the Developers.
Sprint Goal: a short expression of the purpose of a Sprint, often a business problem that is addressed. Functionality might be adjusted during the Sprint in order to achieve the Sprint Goal.
Sprint Planning: Scrum Event that is time-boxed to 8 hours, or less, to start a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the work from the Product Backlog that’s most valuable to be done next and design that work into Sprint backlog.
Sprint Retrospective: Scrum Event that is set to a time-box of 3 hours, or less, to end a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the past Sprint and plan for improvements to be enacted during future Sprints.
Sprint Review: Scrum Event that is set to a time-boxed of 4 hours, or less, to conclude the development work of a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team and the stakeholders to inspect the Increment of product resulting from the Sprint, assess the impact of the work performed on overall progress toward the Product Goal and update the Product backlog in order to maximize the value of the next period.
Stakeholder: a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that is required for incremental discovery. Represented by the Product Owner and actively engaged with the Scrum Team at Sprint Review.
Stakeholder Management:
- Crowd (Low interest / low power)
- Context setters (Low interest / high power)
- Subjects (High interest / low power)
- Players (High interest / high power)
Story Mapping: is a technique used in product discovery: outlining a new product or a new feature for an existing product. The result is a Story Map: all the user stories arranged in functional groups.
Story Slicing (splitting) is the process of breaking a single user story down into smaller stories.
Story Point: Story points in Scrum are units of measurement used to estimate the effort required to complete a story. When planning for an upcoming sprint, Scrum teams use story point estimation to gauge how much effort is needed to develop a new software feature or update.
Swarming: is a collaborative approach where team members with the necessary skills join forces to complete a task that is proving challenging for a single team member.
T
Technical Debt: the typically unpredictable overhead of maintaining the product, often caused by less than ideal design decisions, contributing to the total cost of ownership. May exist unintentionally in the Increment or introduced purposefully to realiSe value earlier.
U
User Story: agile software development practice from Extreme Programming to express requirements from an end user perspective, emphasizing verbal communication. In Scrum, it is often used to express functional items on the Product Backlog.
V
Values: When the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the *Scrum pillars* of transparency, inspection, and adaptation *come to life* and *build trust* for everyone. The Scrum Team members learn and explore those values as they work with the Scrum events, roles and artifacts.
Velocity: an optional, but often used, indication of the amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint by a Scrum Team, tracked by the Developers for use within the Scrum Team.
W
Work-in-Progress: many Scrum teams limit work in progress (WIP) at the beginning of the Sprint by filling the Sprint Plan with work. The teams are given the ownership of deciding how much work to pull into the sprint.