Glossary

Agile, as defined by the oxford dictionary, is the ability to respond to change quickly and easily. Sometimes referred to as Agile Development or Agile Software Development, Agile seeks to break large projects down into small batches.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (aka the Agile Manifesto) is a document first published in 2001, in Utah. It was written over two days when seventeen people envisioned an alternative future to the historically, documentation and process-heavy, software development practices of the time.

Agile Release Train (ART), is a term from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The ART is a group of cross-functional Agile teams composed of roughly 50-125 people. Small to mid-size organizations may have a single ART, whereas a large organization may have two or more ARTs.

In product development, a backlog is a prioritized list of features, bugs and tasks (often referred to as “tickets” or “tasks”) that a team plans to work on in the future.

Backlog grooming, also known as backlog refinement, is the process of reviewing and updating stories and tasks from a team’s or product’s backlog to ensure they are prioritized, understood, and ready for delivery.

In Agile software development, there are a variety of reports to show progress both during and after a sprint: velocity report, cumulative flow diagrams, control charts, burnup charts, and the burndown chart.

Continuous improvement is the process of constantly refining software processes and practices in an effort to increase efficiency of teams and quality of the products they produce. A combination of agile methodologies and lean principles provides a solid foundation for the practice of continuous improvement upon which the practices of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) can further catalyze ongoing improvement.

A customer journey is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes to interact with a product in one or more channels. It outlines the customer’s experience from their initial awareness of the product through the post-purchase evaluation.

The Daily Scrum is a Scrum Event that occurs daily within the Sprint. It is a timeboxed event that should last no longer than 15 minutes. In the meeting, members of the Scrum Team come together to inspect the progress of the Sprint and plan their activities until the next Daily Scrum.

Digital whiteboards are a digital representation of a typical dry-erase whiteboard. As remote work has exploded, company workforces now commonly span multiple locations, time zones and countries. This has led to a huge surge in the usefulness of digital whiteboards.

The discovery phase of the product development cycle is the stage where customer problems or goals are uncovered and solutions to those problems are validated. Since it’s cheaper to test concepts than it is to develop them, this phase should be done before a solution is implemented.

In agile software development, particularly in Scrum, teams usually use story points to give a relative size to their stories. The most common numbering system in use is Fibonacci Sizing. A true Fibonacci sequence goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.

Impact vs effort prioritization is usually a good place to start for organizations or teams that haven’t used a formal model for prioritizing and want to quickly establish rough priority for a large backlog of tasks.

“Iteration” is a general term for a fixed length of time during which a software or other team works together to advance the team’s or company’s goals. It comes from the iterative software development method, which came about in the late seventies.

Kanban is a Japanese term meaning “visual record” or “card” or, more succinctly, “signal card”. It originated in Japanese manufacturing and was a central part of Toyota’s “kaizen” (continuous improvement) process.

Background In the 1980s a quality management educator named Noriaki Kano created a customer satisfaction framework that ranks various levels about how customers perceive the quality of a product over time.

In software development, lead time is a measure of how long it will take a team to produce a new feature from the time the request is made (when it enters the backlog) to the time it ships.

Lean is a business philosophy and a methodology aimed at eliminating as much waste from a production process as possible. It originated with the Toyota Production System but it has widely been adopted by manufacturing, service and tech industries worldwide.

This version can evolve as customer feedback and usage is analyzed. This is an agile approach to product development because it is iterative and aims to validate market interest before investing more resources than are necessary during early stages of the product life cycle.

A Minimum Viable Product (aka MVP) is the smallest, value-adding feature-set a release should have to provide sufficient feedback to validate an idea. The concept was popularized in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries which outlined a methodology to shorten the learning & validation cycles in product development.

Knowingly or otherwise, virtually everyone working in technology will have come across Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®), but few really understand what it means, how it is calculated, and how improving it helps an organization.

The Now, Next, Later roadmap is a simplified, yet powerful roadmap format that makes it easy to convey a product’s current and future endeavors at a glance. It is free of dates and dependencies, making it easy to put together and great for communicating “here’s what I’m doing with my product” to team members, peers, and even company leadership.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a management method for effectively measuring the performance of an individual, team, or organization. In the OKR system: Objectives describe the what — what are your company, team, or individual objectives?

The differences between being output focused and outcome focused are determined by how success is measured. Output Focus Product and development teams that measure success based on efforts rather than the consequences of those efforts are being output-focused.

Personas are fictional characters that product, design and marketing teams create to represent the main users of their product. Personas keep teams customer-focused. It’s easy for product managers or UX designers to focus on a single user flow and neglect how certain decisions might impact other users.

Planning Poker, also known as Pointing Poker or Scrum Poker is an Agile estimation method used by many Agile teams, particularly Scrum teams. It is easy to learn and provides a quick way to estimate stories, discover knowledge gaps, and encourage conversation.

Prioritization is the process of deciding what is most important for a team to work on. For technology companies, it involves ranking tasks (used synonymously herein for user stories, tasks, requirements, issues, etc.

The Product Backlog is one of the 3 artifacts in Scrum. It represents the master list of all work that is necessary to improve the product. The Product Backlog is treated as the single source of work for the Scrum Team.

There is not a tech industry-wide consensus on the difference between a Product Owner (PO) and a Product Manager (PM). Nor is there consensus as to what each of them mean.

Software requirements are the conditions that must be met for a release to be considered complete. Requirements specs are the documented descriptions of those conditions. The term requirement is often used interchangeably with:

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was created by Dean Leffingwell–a devout Lean-Agile practitioner and author–as a way to systematically scale Agile throughout larger software organizations. It has evolved over the years as the founder and other SAFe contributors have learned to apply the principles more efficiently and to an audience beyond the technology organization within a company.

Scope creep is a term that describes when changes are added to a project that go beyond its intended goal. The term scope represents the parameters or requirements that depict the project’s definition of done.

Scrum is the most widely adopted agile methodology today. The 15th state of Agile Report found that 66% of agile teams used Scrum and a further 15% used a variation of Scrum.

The Scrum Master is one of the 3 roles defined in Scrum. It is primarily responsible for the success of Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide within the organization. They do this through helping others understand Scrum theory, practice and how using Scrum can benefit them.

A Sprint within the Scrum framework is a set, repeating span of time that a team uses to focus on accomplishing the most important work. Sprints are supposed to be short (usually 1-2 weeks long) but the duration varies.

The Sprint Backlog is one of the 3 artifacts in Scrum. It represents a subset of the Product Backlog and is formed during Sprint Planning. Sprints in Scrum are timeboxed iterations in which Scrum teams work to deliver incremental value to their customers.

In Scrum, one of the key ceremonies or meetings is the Sprint Demo. The Sprint Demo is intended to be the culmination of the team’s hard work during the sprint and an opportunity to demonstrate new functionality, fixed bugs, or even new architecture.

The Sprint Goal is defined by the Scrum Team during Sprint Planning. It is a concise articulation of the single objective for the Sprint. The Sprint Goal gives the Scrum Team a clear goal for the Sprint.

In Scrum, the Sprint Retrospective is the final event of the Sprint and concludes the Sprint. The intent of the Sprint Retrospective is for the team to inspect the sprint, how it went, how they worked together and seek to continually improve.

Sprint Velocity is another term for the capacity a team has. It’s used to measure how many story points a development team can complete within a Sprint. In order for a team to forecast how many story points they can complete within a future time frame, they need to have a record of story points already completed in the past.

Two key tenets of Agile and Scrum are transparency and accountability. There is one key ceremony which encourages both on a daily basis. It is called the stand-up meeting. This meeting is the heartbeat of any effective Agile team and should be practiced by all Agile teams, whether they use Scrum, Kanban, or some other form of Agile.

Story points are numeric values used to estimate the size of a user story. User stories are often known as “tickets” or “tasks”. They represent the smallest increment of work that development uses to deliver work.

T-shirt sizing is a method in agile software development to estimate a group of initiatives relative to each effort’s complexity. T-shirt sizing uses the following scale: XS (extra small) S (small) M (medium) L (large) XL (extra large) Typically, the purpose of t-shirt sizing is to give product and business decision-makers adequate information about the relative cost certain projects will incur.

Technical debt, more commonly known as tech debt, is a general term given to tasks or stories in a product backlog to address several common categories of issues. The shared theme among these issues is that resolving them typically doesn’t directly change or improve a product so they are generally assigned low priority and teams usually have to negotiate with a product manager or leadership to get them into a sprint.

A use case in product development depicts a specific need a user has that a product can solve. A use case is often just another term for a customer requirement that development teams use to communicate why they’re building what they’re building.

A user story is the documentation that represents the smallest increment of work a development team does. User stories are often referred to in two different contexts: As overall tickets As a written, first-person value-statement from the perspective of a user Tickets can contribute to an epic or they can be a single, standalone ticket.

User story estimation and sizing is the process before development begins by which a development team predicts (approximately) how much effort a task will likely take to complete. Once a user story has been written and groomed, it is ready for the development team to estimate the size of the ticket in the form of story points.

Vanity Metrics are product metrics that appear to assess the performance of a product or service but do not actually provide meaningful insight into the success or effectiveness of the product.

Waterfall is a software development methodology and was the primary methodology used by software teams and companies until the mid 2000s when it largely fell out of favor of Agile methodologies.

Weighted, Shortest Job First (WSJF) is an agile software prioritization method that product development teams use to rank what features and projects should be worked on. It was popularized by Don Reinertsen.