Scrum Glossary

Adaptation is one of the three Scrum pillars. It means the Scrum team can change plans, processes, or products that don't work or could work better. This enables Scrum teams to implement change management in sprints and projects as needed.

Artifacts provide information that the Scrum team and stakeholders need to understand the product under development and other activities. The three Scrum artifacts are product backlog, sprint backlog, and product increment.

Backlog is an accumulated and prioritized list of work to be completed by the Scrum team.

Buffer is a budget for unplanned tasks and interruptions in a sprint. It helps absorb delays on items on the critical path and collect user stories dropped during change management.

A Scrum burn-down chart is a graph showing completed work per day against the projected rate of project completion. It helps to ensure a project is on track to produce the expected deliverable on time.

A Scrum burn-up chart tracks how much work has been completed against the total amount of work in a project or sprint. It helps teams track their progress towards the completion of a project or sprint.

Cadence refers to how long a sprint, release, or program increment lasts. It is the length of the team's development cycle

Scrum ceremonies are events that occur during a sprint. These include sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review, sprint retrospective, and backlog grooming (product backlog refinement).

Common sprint is a timebox during which a shared increment is synchronized and completed with outputs from a Scrum of Scrums (multiple Scrum development teams).

Daily Scrum or stand-up meeting is a 15-30 minute meeting for the team to share progress, tackle challenges, and ensure they're all on the same page.

A definition of done (DoD) is a collection of criteria a team must complete for a project to be considered done. It is a checklist used to create a shared understanding of what makes a product releasable.

A dependency board provides visibility into the dependencies between items in a sprint. It helps visualize all the dependencies, collaborations, and events that may impact a development team or Scrum of Scrums.

The development team is the core part of a Scrum team that develops or creates the product. They do the day-to-day work on the project and are often QA testers, programmers, designers, and other technical experts.

Emergence is the rising prominence of new facts, new knowledge of a fact, or knowledge of a fact becoming visible. It implies that solutions to problems become clear when teams work on them.

Empiricism is a foundational Scrum belief that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on acquired knowledge and experience. Three pillars that uphold the empirical (Scrum) process are transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

A forecast is a guess or assumption based on reliable information and evidence. Forecasting may be used to determine variables like project length or budget.

An impediment is a roadblock or anything slowing the team down or preventing them from completing work or delivering as expected.

Increment is the continuous collection of results. It is the value delivered for the customer through the product backlog items completed in a sprint.

Interrupt buffer is a method of allowing emergent work or interruptions to be brought into the sprint and worked on as they occur, encouraging flexibility and responsiveness in the development process.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) develops and delivers enterprise-class systems and software with many teams involved. It is a framework for scaling Scrum to multiple teams who work together on a single product.

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (MVB) is a way of implementing just enough processes to make things work.

A parking lot is an unofficial meeting often following the daily Scrum, where team members discuss critical issues, impediments, or topics that go beyond the scope of the daily Scrum. Only those required to resolve the issues attend a parking lot.

A product is the value the team produces for delivery to stakeholders. It's the Scrum team's deliverable results.

Product backlog is a priority-ordered list of features and requirements needed to deliver a product successfully.

The product owner is accountable for the Scrum team's work and results. This is not to be confused with the non-Scrum role of product manager who is accountable for the product.

A definition of ready (DoR) is used to determine whether work on a task is ready to be started. It serves as a checklist of criteria to help facilitate a team's decision to begin working on a new task.

Refinement is the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items and stories in a backlog.

Release planning is a longer-term planning event used to align stakeholder/team expectations, acquire funding, and drive marketing. It balances customer expectation and value against the constraints of scope, schedule, and budget.

Scrum is an Agile framework that helps teams work together and create consistent value through continuous learning and adaptation.

Scrum at Scale is a way of expanding and scaling Scrum to meet complex issues within an organization and deliver value.

Scrum board is a tool that shows the tasks needed in a sprint, organized by stories. It's a living document, updated at the daily Scrum, to reflect the team's thinking and progress during a sprint.

Scrum events create consistency and minimize the need for meetings not defined within the Scrum framework. The five Scrum events are sprints, sprint planning, daily Scrum (or Stand-up meetings), sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.

A Scrum master is accountable for the team's effectiveness by enabling team members to improve work practices and become more effective and proficient in Scrum processes.

Scrum of Scrums is a team with representatives from multiple Scrum teams working towards a shared objective or an integrated set of products.

A Scrum team is a team of people, including a Scrum master, product owner, and development team, working towards a common goal — like a working product.

The five Scrum values are openness, focus, commitment, respect, and courage.

Self-designing teams are able to manage who is on the team. They add, remove, or transfer personnel as needed.

Self-managing teams are autonomous and decide team responsibilities, deadlines, and best practices without the intervention of a supervisor or explicit directions being imposed on them.

Self-organized teams determine how to manage their workloads, solve problems, and collaborate effectively without direction from stakeholders or other external influences.

A servant leader is someone whose approach to leadership revolves around supporting and empowering their team. Scrum master is an example of a servant leadership role.

A spike is an experimental user story used to gain experience to increase the accuracy of a story estimate. Spikes are used for running timeboxed research and investigation to learn about a specific story or solution.

A sprint is a recurring cycle during which the Scrum team must complete a planned amount of work and produce a deliverable. Sprints typically last for two to four weeks.

Sprint burn-down calculates how much work is completed in a sprint and how much work remains to be done.

Sprint goal is the singular objective for each sprint. It provides clarity on what is needed, who needs it, why it is needed, and how it will provide value, creating focus and alignment in the team.

A Sprint must be long enough to complete stories. A typical sprint length is between two weeks and one month, giving enough time for the development team to get work done.

Sprint planning is where the team meets to decide backlog items, user stories, and activities they need to complete during the upcoming sprint.

Sprint retrospective is a Scrum event where the team examines their work, identifying what went well and what didn't. This reflection is done in the hopes that understanding breakdowns and successes will help make the next sprint better. A sprint retrospective happens after a sprint review and before sprint planning.

Sprint review is when the team demos what they shipped during a sprint. It's held at the end of each sprint, allowing stakeholders to inspect the increment and the team to adapt the backlog if needed.

A stakeholder is a person with an interest in and knowledge of the product or project. They provide feedback and requirements to the team. Examples are users, customers, sponsors, or data architects.

State of the Process is an outline of the main activities and flow of Scrum projects grouped into five main phases: initiating, planning, implementing, reviewing, and releasing.

Story is the smallest unit of work for Agile development teams. It's expressed from the user's perspective and focuses on business value. Stories outline the desired outcome of a task in a way the team understands.

A storyboard is a visual consisting of illustrations and images displayed in sequence to provide viewers with a high-level picture of the interconnectedness of user stories in a project. Storyboards can be physical or digital.

Story points are units of measurement expressing an estimate of the effort required to develop an item or user story. Teams assign story points relative to work complexity, the amount of work required, and risk or uncertainty.

Story time, similar to backlog refinement, is when the Scrum team meets to discuss and groom the backlog so the next planning meeting can be efficient and productive.

A Scrum task board shows the team's progress during a sprint. It's a physical or digital board of user stories showing which are completed, in progress, or not yet started.

Thumb votes enable teams to reach a consensus quickly and as a group. It is implemented by someone proposing an idea and having the team members vote by giving a thumbs down, thumbs up, or thumb to the side.

Timeboxing is the act of setting a maximum time period for an activity or event to be completed. A few timeboxing examples include sprints, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.

Velocity measures the rate at which Scrum teams deliver value. It measures the amount of work a team can do in a sprint.

A vision statement is a concise statement of where the Scrum team should be heading. It provides a common understanding of the desired future state the team is moving towards.

Working agreements are a set of rules a Scrum team agrees to follow to make themselves more efficient and self-organizing. A working agreement is created by the team for the team.

Yesterday's weather is a pattern that helps Scrum teams calculate how many points they are likely to complete in an upcoming sprint based on how many points were completed in preceding sprints.

3-5-3 is a simple way to remember the essential components of Scrum. The 3-5-3 sequence represents the 3 roles, 5 events, and 3 artifacts of Scrum. The three Scrum roles are Scrum master, product owner, and development team. The five events are sprint, sprint planning, daily scrum meeting, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. The three artifacts are product backlog, sprint backlog, product increment.