Agile and Scrum Glossary - SCRUMstudy
Agile and Scrum Glossary - SCRUMstudy
Agile and Scrum Glossary - SCRUMstudy
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The product characteristics, specied by the Product Owner, that need to be satised
(/scrum-cae.asp) before they are accepted by the user, customer, or other authorized entity. These are
Acceptance Criteria
Agile Master Certied used as standards to measure and compare the characteristics of the nal product with
specied characteristics.
These tests are run from a business and customer point of view. These tests check the
(/scrum-spoc.asp) Acceptance Test requested and implemented feature and determine whether these features match the
Scrum Product Owner Certied business and the customer requirements
Acceptance-Test-
A system or product development method in which the acceptance criteria are
Driven
discussed extensively by the participants, through the use of examples and well-
Development
designed acceptance tests on the basis of the these criteria before development begins.
(ATTD)
Accuracy The degree by which the measured value is very close to the true value (PMI).
Accuracy The degree by which the measured value is very close to the true value (PMI).
It is the process of conrming and securing the team necessary to complete the a
Acquire Project
project. Skill, experience and availability of resources are important parameters
Team
considered while acquiring project team.
Agile methodologies reduce waste by cutting back on work that does not add value.
Planning a project does not directly add business value. Therefore, planning at any stage
Adaptive planning of a Scrum project should be as ecient as possible. Planning ahead for the whole
project is considered waste, because Agile projects are prone to a high rate of change.
Therefore, planning is done Just in Time (JIT).
This is done to take care of risks that were not initially identied or when the impact of a
Additional Risk
risk on objectives is greater than expected. The existing risk response planning may not
Response Planning
be enough to control the risk.
Agile Unied Process (AUP) is a renement of the "IBM Rational Unied Process (RUP)"
Agile Unied rst described by Craig Larman in 2001. Agile concepts and techniques are used to
Process select elements from RUP. Iterations are classied into two types: Development and
Release.
A sequential development process in which the output from the previous step is used as
All-Before-Any
input for the next step in the process using a batch size of 100%.
The method used, or steps taken in, setting about a task or problem by the Scrum team.
Approach
The approach diers from team to team.
Any concrete by-product formed during the development cycle. Example of artifacts
Artifact
includes the Product Backlog and the Sprint Backlog.
Assumptions Factors which, for planning purposes, are considered to be true, real or certain.
A project management exercise that explores the validity of assumptions that were
Assumptions made at the beginning of the project to identify any potential project risk conceived and
Analysis developed because of the inaccuracy of any assumption. It also identies risks because
of any instability, inconsistency, or incompleteness of assumptions.
Basic Unied BUP is a simpler variation of Rational Unied Process (RUP) developed in 2005. It was
Process (BUP) optimized for small projects by IBM.
A group activity or creativity technique that can be used to generate and analyze ideas
Brainstorming
or to identify issues, risks, or even to determine solutions to problems.
CMMI is a process improvement product suite. It was developed by the CMMI project as
Capability Maturity
a collaborative industry, government, and academic eort, which combined best
Model Integration
practices for software development. It is very eective for projects involving dened
(CMMI)
processes.
Capacity is dened by the amount of work that can be accomplished within the available
Capacity
resources.
A formal act or set of acts performed as prescribed by ritual or custom. Core Scrum
Ceremony activities like spring planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective are
referred to as ceremony by the Scrum team.
The state of crisis that needs to be immediately addressed to prevent further harm or
Chaotic Domain
loss and re-establish the order. It calls for quick response.
A fable used in the Agile Project Management to dene the type of role an attendee can
play in Scrum. It derives from the fable of a chicken and a pig that planned to open a
Chickens and Pigs
restaurant together. Both of them are involved but only the pigs are committed. Pigs
have to get the project completed according to the requirements.
Chief Product The person responsible for the overall Product Backlog in product development with
Owner multiple Scrum Teams.
Chrysler C3 was a project to have a single payroll system for everyone in Chrysler. This project
Comprehensive ran from 1993 until DaimlerChrysler (after Chrysler was bought out) stopped the C3
Compensation project on February 1, 2000. Many Agile software development techniques were
System Project (C3) developed during this project; chief among them was Extreme Programming (XP).
Collect Process of dening and documenting stakeholder's needs to meet the project
Requirements objectives.
Collective In a Scrum Project environment, the whole team is collectively responsible for ensuring
accountability that the work agreed on for a Sprint is completed in a timely manner.
Communications
Technologies or methods to transfer information among project stakeholders.
Technology
Complex Adaptive Numerous entities governed by common simple localized rules, which interact with each
System other in various ways and receive constant feedback.
A domain in the Cynen framework wherein the situation is unpredictable and the
Complex Domain
correctness of the answer is only known in hindsight.
Component teams are specialized teams organized around the architecture of the
product under development. A team that focuses on the creation of one or more
Component Team components of a larger product that a customer would purchase. Component teams
create assets or components that are then reused by other teams to assemble
customer-valuable solutions.
Conditions of satisfaction are the acceptance criteria specied by the product owner,
Conditions of which determine the desired behavior of the product that to be accepted. These are the
Satisfaction conditions under which the product owner is satised with the outcome of each product
backlog item.
Continuous Delivering the product or each product feature to its users immediately after it is
Delivery integrated and tested by the developer.
Continuous Delivering the product or each product feature to its users immediately after it is
Deployment integrated and tested by the developer.
On most traditional projects, lessons learned are compiled at the end of the project so
they can be applied to future projects. However, applying lessons to future projects
does not add value to the current project. Future projects may not be similar to past
Continuous
projects. Therefore, Agile aims to continuously learn during each project and apply
Improvement
lessons learned within the current project. Several tools, techniques, knowledge sets,
and skills can continuously improve Agile projects - e.g. retrospective meetings,
knowledge sharing etc.
Monetary loss incurred due to delay in work, process, or achieving production targets.
Cost of Delay
This concept emphasizes that the time associated with project has a nancial cost.
Cross Functional A project team that has expertise from the dierent elds, like designers, developers,
Team and testers who have skills required to complete the work eectively and eciently.
The Crystal family of methodologies was developed by Alistair Cockburn in the mid-
1990s. The methodologies are named after colors and/or gemstones to indicate the
"weight" of methodology needed (as per the team attributes or strategic needs). The
Crystal
most famous is also the lightest, called "Crystal Clear," used for small teams with co-
located members working on noncritical tasks. The family focuses on eciency and
habitability as constituents of project safety.
The daily standup meeting, or Scrum meeting, is a daily team meeting in the Scrum
Framework. The name comes from the practice of the attendees standing up. This
Daily Stand-Up
encourages the members to keep the meeting short. It gives the team a regular
opportunity to monitor progress along the sprint plan.
A well-dened process that produces the same output for the same input every time
Dened Process (minus the minor variations within the range). The inputs, outputs and the steps
involved are clearly stated in such process.
Dened Process A process control approach used for dened processes. This model primarily involves
Control creating and maintaining processes that produce expected output.
Conditions that need to be satised by the product backlog item before it is considered
Denition of Ready
ready to pull into a sprint during sprint planning.
This is one of the domains in the Cynen framework. This is a dangerous stage, and the
Disorder Domain priority should be to come out of this domain because we either don't understand or
can't make sense of the situation we are in.
This technique is used for identifying items with higher priority. Participants have to cast
their vote by placing a colored dot against one item among the listed, and the item with
Dot Voting
most dots is considered an item of higher priority. This technique is frequently used
during the sprint retrospective.
A process control approach used when processes are incompletely dened and the
Empirical Process
output is unique. This model leverages frequent inspection, adaptation and
Control
transparency. Scrum enables empirical process control for project management.
End uncertainty is the uncertainty surrounding the properties of the nal deliverable of
End Uncertainty
a project or process.
An epic is a large user story, typically one that is too big to t in a single sprint. Epics
Epic need to be broken down into smaller user stories at some point before implementation
as part of a sprint.
An Agile Method sourced from Rational Unied Process (RUP), Capability Maturity Model
Integration (CMMI) and Agile processes. Used primarily for software development, it was
Essential Unied developed by Ivar Jacobson, one of the original contributors to RUP, as an improvement
Process on the Rational Unied Process. It is practice centric rather than focused on
processes/roles. It relies on Separation of Concerns, a principle of separating the
product into separate sections, each addressing a separate concern.
A rough calculation of the number, quantity, or size of product backlog items, portfolio
Estimation
backlog item, and sprint backlog task.
Estimating or predicting future project status and progress based on knowledge and
Forecasting
information available at the time of forecasting.
Functional Testing usually describes what the system does. Here functions are tested by
Functional Testing usually describes what the system does. Here functions are tested by
feeding input and examining the output. It is type of 'Black Box Testing' where we do not
Functional Test
consider the internal program structure and mostly compare the actual and expected
outputs.
In Japanese, this means "go and see for yourself." It is the conviction that real time
experience is more useful than theory. One must see the problem to understand the
Genchi Genbutsu
problem rather than hear about a problem from someone else. This will help in making
an informed decision about the solution.
Group Decision Used to generate, classify, and prioritize product requirements. Some methods used to
Making Techniques reach group decisions are: unanimity, majority, plurality, and dictatorship.
Funding a part of the product development without committing to funding all of it. With
Incremental incremental funding, only a small part of the development eort is funded, after which
Funding the funding decision is critically valued to see what is being paid to get from this small
part.
Information A visual display that presents suciently detailed, up-to-date, and important
Radiator information to passersby in an easy self-interpretative format.
The opportunity lost to create an innovative solution. Usually occurs when a prescribed
Innovation Waste
solution is provided with a product backlog item.
Internal The stakeholders who are internal to the organization, i.e., those who are involved in
Internal The stakeholders who are internal to the organization, i.e., those who are involved in
Stakeholders product development. For example, senior executives, managers and internal users.
Iterative Product In iterative product development, the nal product is developed over a few iterations
Development and delivered to the customer.
This term means "signboard" in Japanese. Taiichi Ohno adapted the word used for shop
Kanban signboards to depict the following philosophy: A down steam process must go and fetch
what it needs--similar to how we go and fetch what we need from a shop/store.
Named after Noriaki Kano, a Japanese professor Kano Model is used to map what is
valued by the customer by classifying the product attributes into basic, performance,
Kano Model
and excitement categories. It can be used to determine the minimally viable product
that a customer will feel satises his or her basic requirements.
A status category for technical debt that represents the debt that is known to the
Known Technical development team and has been made visible for future consideration. Contrast with
Debt "happened-upon technical debt" and "targeted technical debt." See also "technical
debt."
Lean Manufacturing or simply Lean focuses on the removal of waste from the
production. It is a practice for delivering more or same value with less resource by
Lean eliminating waste across organizations and business processes. Lean considers an
element or activity as 'Waste' if the same is used for purposes other than creating value
to the customers.
Lean Product LPD is the application of Lean Principles to product development. It is one of the initial
Development (LPD) Agile methods.
1. The total prot potential for a product over its lifetime. 2. The total prot potential of
Lifecycle Prots
the entire portfolio rather than a single product.
Minimum The smallest or minimum set of functionality related to a feature that must be delivered
Marketable for the customer to perceive value (for it to be marketable). Contrast with "minimum
Features (MMFs) releasable features."
Features (MMFs) releasable features."
Minimum Viable A product with just those minimal features that allow it to be deployed, and no more.
Product (MVP) Usually, MVP is the result of the rst sprint.
This is a Japanese term used to refer to any wasteful activity that has no value. Muda is
an essential factor in Kanban. In order to run a business, an organization has to produce
goods or provide services for the customer to buy or pay for. This requires a process,
Muda and this process makes use of resources. The waste factor comes into the picture when
resources are consumed unnecessarily. The Kanban approach increases awareness of
wasteful resource consumption and helps identify waste and unexploited prospects and
opportunities.
Must-have The set of features that must be present in the upcoming release for the release to be
Features viable.
Nice-to-have These are the features that are targeted as "would be nice to have" in an upcoming
Features release but can be left out if there is a shortage of funds to complete the project.
Objective Denition is part of a Sprint Planning Meeting, wherein the Product Owner
Objective
explains the prioritized items in the Product Backlog and the team commits to the
Denition
Product Backlog items to be completed during the Sprint.
An open source process framework developed by the Eclipse Foundation from Basic
Open Unied
Unied Process (BUP) of IBM. The Core principles are: iterative life cycle, collaboration,
Process
Unied Process (BUP) of IBM. The Core principles are: iterative life cycle, collaboration,
Process
Management of requirements and Cognizance of architecture.
Organization Chart Charts that are used to show positions and relationships in a graphical format.
Plan Risk
Process of dening how to conduct risk management activities for a project.
Management
The unfortunate phenomena of inating the value of product backlog size estimates in
Point Ination an attempt to conform to or optimize an unwisely conceived measure (such as achieving
a target velocity).
Sessions scheduled for the purpose of rehearsing and performance improvement are
Practice called practice. For example, the principle of demonstrating progress is supported by
the sprint review Scrum practice.
Degree by which the values of repeated measurements are clustered and have little
Precision
scatter [PMI].
Principle of Least
Acting or developing work products in a way that is least likely to astonish the users.
Astonishment
Astonishment
Scrum believes in delivering the greatest amount of value in the least amount of time.
Prioritized Delivery This requires prioritized delivery in which "what will be done" has to be chosen from
"what has to be done" according to business value.
Product Backlog The ltering of tasks on the product backlog based on their importance as per criteria
Grooming set by the product owner.
Product Backlog An item such as a feature or benet that is valuable to the process of product
Item (PBI) development.
Product Documents the characteristics of the product, or deliverable which the project is
Description undertaken to create.
Product
The entire scope of the eort put in to create or enhance a product or service.
Development Eort
The leader of the product development team. The voice of the stakeholder community
Product Owner
to the scrum team. The product owner denes what to do and in what order to do it
Product Owner A person authorized by the product owner to act on his behalf in particular situations.
Proxy See also "product owner."
A product road map is a high-level plan that shows when in the future new products are
expected to be developed or introduced by the organization/team. The requests to edit
Product Roadmap
the road map (usually by adding new products) come from the sales force or senior
management in the company when the marketing strategy is made.
A statement describing the desired future state that would be achieved by developing
Product Vision and deploying a product. A good product vision is simple, easy to understand statement
and provides a coherent direction to the people who are asked to realize it.
Progressive Breaking-down, in an organized manner, large lightly detailed product backlog items
Progressive Breaking-down, in an organized manner, large lightly detailed product backlog items
Renement into a set of smaller, more detailed items.
The set of up-front work needed to dene a project at particular level of detail so that a
Project Chartering
funding decision can be made.
Project Closeout Processes and procedures developed for the closing or canceling of projects.
It can include correspondence, memos, meeting minutes, and documents describing the
Project Records
project.
Describes in specic terms a project or product attribute and how it is measured by the
Quality Metrics
quality control process.
A term adapted from Lean Manufacturing. An inventory of items that wait for the next
Queue
action in the work stream.
Recruitment
The policies, guidelines, or procedures that govern the recruitment of sta.
Practices
A technique of planning product releases on regular or cyclic time period. Made famous
Release Train by Cisco for its IOS software platform, each release is then decomposed into several
projects for Multiple Products.
One of the planned risk responses in which we try to avoid the risk entirely by changing
Risk Avoidance
One of the planned risk responses in which we try to avoid the risk entirely by changing
Risk Avoidance
some aspect of the project.
A well-dened set of responsibilities that may be fullled by one or more people and for
Role which they are accountable. The three Scrum roles are product owner, Scrum Master,
and development team.
Scrum board is used to plan and track progress during a Sprint which usually contains
three columns to indicate the progress of the estimated tasks for the Sprint: a To Do
Scrum Board column for the tasks not yet started, a Work in Progress column for the tasks
started but not completed, and a Done column for the tasks completed. Scrum
board also contains the Sprint burn down chart and space for unexpected items.
A set of principles, values, practices and rules that form the base for Scrum-based
Scrum Framework
development.
The Scrum Master is one of the three Core/Pig roles on a Scrum team. Scrum Master
Scrum Master facilitates Scrum and is responsible for removing obstacles; thus enabling the team to
deliver the sprint goal/deliverable.
Scrum of Scrums is analogous to the Daily Scrum. This meeting is facilitated by the Chief
Scrum of Scrum Scrum Master and usually conducted in large projects where multiple Scrum teams to
work in sync to ensure project progress.
There are three core roles in Scrum: The Product Owner, The Scrum Master, and the
Scrum Roles Scrum team (also called the development team). These are the people responsible for
completing the project objectives.
A Scrum team is composed of a product owner, Scrum Master, and development team,
Scrum Team
responsible for the high-quality and timely delivery of sprint commitments.
responsible for the high-quality and timely delivery of sprint commitments.
A team or a group of people that manage themselves, their time and resources is said to
Self-Organized
be self-organized.
A sprint review activity where the product backlog items that are completed will be
Sprint Demo demonstrated. The intention is to encourage an information-rich discussion between
the Scrum team and other sprint review participants.
The sprint goal is what is to be accomplished by the end of the sprint. Its a summary
Sprint Goal of the activities/results elaborated by the product backlog items that the Product Owner
would like to accomplish during the sprint.
Sprint Planning The sprint planning meeting takes place at the beginning of each sprint. The purpose of
Meeting the meeting is to dene the objectives and tasks.
Sprint Its the review and analysis done at the end of every sprint. The aim is to improve the
Retrospective performance of the Scrum team and adopt better practices.
The sprint review meeting takes place at the end of each sprint. The delivery team
Sprint Review shows what they accomplished during the sprint. Activity attributes are reviewed,
modied, and reconciled at every sprint review meeting.
Stang Pool Characteristics of those prospective sta that is available to join a team.
Stang Denes what kinds of competencies are required from what kind of individuals or
Requirements groups and in what time frames.
Any person or entity who can aect an endeavor / project, or be aected by it, or be
Stakeholder
perceived itself to be aected is a stakeholder.
Statistical Sampling Sampling which involves choosing part of a population of interest for inspection.
Status Review Meetings that are regularly scheduled to exchange and analyze information about the
Meetings project status and its performance.
The abstract measure of eort to implement a story is called a story point. Typically
Story Point
determined by engaging in planning poker.
The appropriately aggressive pace at which a team works so that it produces a good
Sustainable Pace
ow of business value over an extended period of time without getting burned out.
ow of business value over an extended period of time without getting burned out.
A chart/board that depicts all the work the team is doing during a sprint. There are 5
Task Board
columns: "Story," "To do," "In progress," and "done."
The team breaks down the selected Product Backlog items into tasks and then the tasks
Task Estimation are estimated by the team members according to their complexity, risk involved,
potential time required, and so on using team exercises.
Team Building Activities specically taken by management and team members to help individual team
Activities members work together eectively, thereby improving team performance
A xed duration of time during which an activity is performed. In Scrum, sprints are time
Time Box
boxed iterations.
Tolerances vs. Tolerances indicate specied range of acceptable results. Control Limits are the
Control limits thresholds, which indicate whether the process is out of control.
One of the key principles of Scrum is transparency, wherein the customer is constantly
Transparency aware of the product progress, and the team members are aware of their roles and
responsibilities.
Also called symptoms or warning signs, they are indications that an event has occurred
Triggers
or is about to occur. Commonly used in Risk Management.
A User Story is a statement (or a group of statements) that expresses the desired end
User Stories user functionality. User Stories are generally simple, short, and easy to implement.
User Stories user functionality. User Stories are generally simple, short, and easy to implement.
Longer User Stories are further broken down into multiple User Stories.
The Product Owner (PO) represents the stakeholders and is responsible for ensuring
Voice of that the team delivers value. The PO is responsible for ensuring clear communication of
Customer(VOC) product functionalities to the Scrum team and, therefore, is commonly called the Voice
of Customer.
The wideband Delphi method is a variation of the Delphi method. Here, after a round of
Wideband Delphi response collection, the panel members are shown the gathered data and the
Method originators of responses far from the mean are asked to justify their survey
response/estimate. This is then followed by another round of response collection.
Won't-have A set of features/options that are specically declared to not be available in the
Features forthcoming release.
Refers to work that has been undertaken but not yet completed. If large segments of
the project are WIP, it can pose several problems. Identifying bottlenecks in the project
Work In Progress becomes dicult when several tasks are WIP at the same time. Each WIP requires
capital and does not contribute to ROI until it becomes a completed, usable product.
Kanban boards are eective in placing limits on WIP.
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