Agile - Useful Terms

Acceptance Criteria

It is the conditions set by the product owner or the customer in order to accept a feature to be valid and adhering to their requirements.

Backlog Grooming

It is an ongoing process in which the product manager or the customer manages the product backlog by getting feedback from agile teams. This process involves prioritizing the portfolio items, breaking them in smaller items, planning them for future iterations, creating new stories, updating acceptance criteria or elaborating acceptance criteria in details.

Capacity

It is the amount of work a team can take to complete in one iteration.

Feature

An improvement done to a product or capability of value to stakeholder which can be developed in a release.

Iteration

A theme-based work item that can be completed within a time box and accepted within the release of a product. Iteration work is defined during iteration planning and it finishes with demo and review meeting. It is also termed as Sprint.

Increment

An increment is the changing state of a product as it undergoes gradual development. It is normally represented by milestones or number of fixed iterations.

Product Owner

The product owner is a member of the Agile delivery team, responsible to collect and rank business requirements in the product backlog. A product owner communicates what is to be done in a release/iteration. He/she sets the commitments and is responsible to protect team from any change in requirements during an iteration.

Product Backlog

Set of functional and non-functional product requirements.

Product Backlog Items

May be user stories, defects, features which are to be developed by the agile team.

Points

A common unit used to set the relative size of user stories, features, or any other portfolio items.

Release

A time box where work is done to support delivery of testable increment to a software. In scrum, a release consists of multiple iterations.

Requirement

A specification of a software product to satisfy a stated contract or functionality. User stories and portfolio items are types of requirements.

Story Points

A unit used by the agile team to estimate relative sizes of user stories and features.

Sprint

Same as Iteration.

Timebox

A fixed duration of time in which a deliverable is to be developed. Normally, along with fixing start and end date of a timebox, the number of resources is also fixed.

Task

It is a unit of work that contributes towards the completion of a user story within an iteration. User stories are decomposed into multiple tasks and each task can be divided between team members marking them as owner of the tasks. Team members can take responsibility of each task, update estimates, log work done or to-do as desired.

User Story

A listed acceptance criteria to fulfil certain requirements of a user. It is normally written from the perspective of an end-user.

Velocity

A measure to weight the accepted work in an iteration or timebox. Normally it is the sum of story points accepted in an iteration.