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Agile and Scrum in practice glossary
51 terms from R09, Agile and Scrum in practice — 26 defined in the guide itself and 25 more from the field around it. Every term the guide teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
R09 · How to build
Agile and Scrum in practice
How do we deliver value in small, safe steps?
Every term below is defined in the words of agile and scrum in practice, guide R09 of craft guides for educational technologists, and opens the guide at the slide where it is taught. 25 of the 51 are the field’s vocabulary rather than the guide’s own: words a reader will meet around this subject, defined here because the guide assumes them. 1 term is also defined by another guide in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole craft glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
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| A | |||
| Acceptance criteria | The conditions a piece of work must meet before the team and the user agree it is done. |
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| Agile Manifesto | A statement written in 2001 by 17 practitioners, setting out four values and 12 principles for software development; it prescribes no roles, events or tools (Beck et al., 2001). |
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| B | |||
| Backlog | The ranked list of work a team may do next. In Scrum, the Product Backlog carries a Product Goal (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). |
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| Backlog refinement | The continuing work of splitting, clarifying, sizing and reordering Product Backlog items so that the ones near the top are ready to be worked on. |
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| Batch | A set of changes released together. Larger batches delay feedback on every change inside them (Reinertsen, 2009). |
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| Burndown chart | A chart of the work remaining in a sprint or release against time, used to see whether the team is on course to finish. |
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| C | |||
| Cargo-cult agile | Copying the visible rituals of agile, such as sprints and stand-ups, without shortening the feedback loop they were meant to serve. |
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| Cone of uncertainty | The range within which a skilled estimate can be wrong, widest at the start of a project (McConnell, 2006). |
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| Cross-functional team | A team whose members together hold all the skills needed to turn a backlog item into working product, without handing work to another team. |
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| Cumulative flow diagram | A stacked chart of how many work items sit in each stage over time, used to spot bottlenecks and growing work in progress. |
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| Cycle time | The time a work item takes from the moment work starts on it to the moment it is finished. |
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| D | |||
| Daily Scrum | A 15-minute daily meeting at which a Scrum team's developers inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal and plan the next day's work. Many teams call it the stand-up. |
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| Definition of Done | The shared quality standard a piece of work must meet to count as part of the Increment. |
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| Definition of Ready | A team's agreed checklist for what a backlog item needs, such as clear acceptance criteria and a size estimate, before it can be taken into a sprint. |
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| E | |||
| Empiricism | The view that knowledge comes from experience and from making decisions based on what is observed; the foundation on which Scrum rests (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). |
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| Epic | A user story too large to finish in one sprint, kept as a placeholder and split into smaller stories before work starts. |
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| Extreme Programming (XP) | An agile method built on engineering practices such as pair programming, test-first development, continuous integration and small, frequent releases. |
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| I | |||
| Increment | A usable step towards the Product Goal. A sprint may produce several. |
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| Information radiator | A large, visible display, such as a task board or burndown chart on a wall, that lets anyone see a team's progress without asking. |
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| INVEST | A test for user stories: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable (Wake, 2003). |
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| Invisible inventory | Unfinished product development work is physically and financially invisible: it waits in queues, takes no space and appears on no balance sheet (Reinertsen, 2009). |
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| K | |||
| Kanban | A way of managing work that makes it visible on a board and limits how much is in progress at once (Anderson, 2010). R10 A method for managing work that makes it visible and limits how much is in progress (Anderson, 2010). |
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| L | |||
| Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) | Scrum applied to many teams working together on one product, with fewer roles and artefacts, not more (Larman & Vodde, n.d.). |
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| M | |||
| Modular contracting | Buying a large system as a series of small contracts, each delivering working parts. |
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| N | |||
| #NoEstimates | A contested practitioner argument for working without estimates, described as exploring alternatives to estimates for making decisions (Zuill, 2013). |
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| P | |||
| Pair programming | Two developers working at one computer on the same code, one writing while the other reviews, and swapping roles often. |
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| Planning fallacy | The tendency to forecast from the details of one plan and underestimate time and cost. |
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| Planning poker | An estimating technique in which team members reveal their estimates for a piece of work at the same moment, using numbered cards, then discuss the differences and repeat until they converge. |
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| Prime directive | An opening rule for retrospectives, that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, which keeps the conversation on the process rather than on blame (Kerth, 2001). |
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| Product Owner | The one person in a Scrum team accountable for the value of the product, who orders the Product Backlog and decides what the team works on next. |
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| R | |||
| Reference class forecasting | Forecasting from the outcomes of similar past projects, then adjusting for the case at hand (Flyvbjerg, 2006). |
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| Retrospective | A regular meeting at which a team inspects its own way of working and decides what to change. |
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| S | |||
| Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) | A scaling framework that promises a common process across many teams, based on ten Lean-Agile principles, and criticised as a return to heavy, prescriptive process (Scaled Agile, n.d.). |
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| Scrum | A framework founded on empiricism and lean thinking, with three accountabilities, five events and three artefacts, whose events create points where a team can inspect and adapt (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). |
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| Scrum Master | The person in a Scrum team accountable for how well the team uses Scrum, who coaches the team and helps remove whatever is blocking its progress. |
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| Scrum of Scrums | A short, regular meeting of representatives from several Scrum teams working on the same product, held to coordinate their work and resolve dependencies between them. |
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| Spike | A short, timeboxed piece of work done to answer a technical or design question so that a later story can be estimated or built with less risk. |
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| Sprint | A fixed period of one month or less in which a Scrum team works towards a Sprint Goal. |
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| Sprint Goal | The single objective a Scrum team commits to for a sprint, which gives the chosen backlog items a shared purpose. |
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| Sprint Planning | The event that opens a sprint, at which the Scrum team agrees why the sprint matters, which backlog items it will take on and how the work will be done. |
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| Sprint Review | The Scrum event at which the team and stakeholders inspect the outcome of a sprint and decide what to adapt. |
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| Story mapping | Arranging user stories in two dimensions, with the steps of a user's activity across the top and detail beneath, so releases can be cut as slices across the whole journey. |
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| Story points | A unit for estimating the relative size of a piece of work, combining effort, complexity and uncertainty, instead of estimating in hours or days. |
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| Sustainable pace | Working at a rate the team could keep up indefinitely, without regular overtime, on the ground that tired teams make more mistakes. |
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| T | |||
| Test-driven development (TDD) | Writing a failing automated test before writing the code that makes it pass, then tidying the code, in short repeated cycles. |
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| Thin slice | A small piece of a feature built through every layer, so users can use it on its own. |
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| Timebox | A fixed maximum length of time given to an event or piece of work, which ends when the time runs out whether or not the work is finished. |
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| U | |||
| User story | A short description of something a user needs, written to prompt conversation and confirmed by acceptance criteria (Jeffries, 2001). |
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| V | |||
| Velocity | The amount of work, usually in story points, that a team finishes in a sprint. Teams average it over recent sprints to forecast how much they can take on next. |
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| W | |||
| Waterfall | Delivering software in one pass through sequential phases of requirements, design, build, test and release, each completed and signed off before the next begins. |
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| Work in progress (WIP) limit | The most items allowed in one stage of work at a time. |
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