Glossary of Terms
Agile project management often makes use of terms that might not be recognisable if you've just arrived. Shared understanding is a key practice in Agile, so here are some terms you need to know.
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Agile project management often makes use of terms that might not be recognisable if you've just arrived. Shared understanding is a key practice in Agile, so here are some terms you need to know.
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Agile project management is an iterative approach to managing software development projects that focuses on continuous releases and incorporating customer feedback with every iteration.
Meetings, or "ceremonies" are an important part of agile development. But they are one of many important elements, and shouldn’t be conducted in a vacuum. These are: Sprint Planning, Sprint Demo, Daily Standup, and Retrospective.
Continuous delivery is an approach where teams release quality products frequently and predictably from source code repository to production in an automated fashion.
A standup is a daily meeting that involves the core team working on a product. It's based on three simple questions that everyone should answer:
What have you worked on yesterday?
What will you work on today?
What is preventing you from doing your work?
These questions highlight progress and help flag team blockers. Also, it strengthens the team when everyone shares the progress they’re contributing to the team. The daily reinforcement of sharing individual successes and plans keeps everyone excited about the team’s overall contribution to the organisation.
An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called “user stories”) based on the needs/requests of our partners.
Epics are a helpful way to organise your work and to create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces, so that large projects can actually get done and you can continue to ship value to your customers on a regular basis. Epics help teams break their work down, while continuing to work towards a bigger goal.
Maintaining agility when organising large tasks, like epics, is no small task. Learning how epics relate to a healthy agile program is an essential skill no matter the size of your organisation.
Kanban is a framework for agile project management that matches the work to the team's capacity. It's focused on getting things done as fast as possible, giving teams the ability to react to change even faster than scrum.
Unlike scrum, kanban has no backlogs (usually). Instead, work sits in the To Do column. This enables kanban teams to focus on continuous releases, which can be done at any time. All work is visible, scoped, and ready to execute on so that when something is completed, the team immediately moves on to the next.
Scrum is a framework for agile project management that uses fixed-length iterations of work, called sprints. There are four ceremonies that bring structure to each sprint.
Sprint reviews are not retrospectives. A sprint review is about demonstrating the hard work of the entire team.
Team members gather around a desk for informal demos and describe the work they’ve done for that iteration. It’s a time to ask questions, try new features, and give feedback. Sharing in success is an important part of building an agile team.
A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user. Its purpose is to articulate how a software feature will provide value to the customer.
It's tempting to think that user stories are, simply put, software system requirements. But they're not.
A key component of agile software development is putting people first, and a user story puts end users at the center of the conversation. These stories use non-technical language to provide context for the development team and their efforts. After reading a user story, the team knows why they are building, what they're building, and what value it creates.
User stories are one of the core components of an agile program. They help provide a user-focused framework for daily work — which drives collaboration, creativity, and a better product overall.
A retrospective is anytime your team reflects on the past to improve the future. Between technical and non-technical teams, you can retro on just about anything!
Part of the . Periodical moment when team members show their progress so that everyone can understand what was really accomplished. This is a convenient way for everyone to quickly review what has been accomplished, a good opportunity for feedback and also a way to ensure that we're all on the same page with how everything is progressing.
Part of our ceremony. Sprint planning is an event in scrum that kicks off the sprint. The purpose of sprint planning is to define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved. Sprint planning is done in collaboration with the whole scrum team.
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Retrospectives are an excellent opportunity for your agile team to evaluate itself and create a plan to address areas of improvement for the future. The retrospective embraces the ideal of - and protects against the pitfalls of complacency - by stepping outside the work cycle to reflect on the past.