A
Acceptance Criteria
These are a set of requirements/conditions that software ought to meet before it is accepted by a user. According to the information they manage on user stories, the product owners are responsible for defining acceptance criteria.
Acceptance Test(s)
These tests need to take place, to ensure the features are working right, according to the acceptance criteria and users’ needs.
Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing is nothing but Marketing being managed with the Agile methodology. Marketing teams then work towards their goals in Sprints, deliver concrete results in short deadlines and assess their results so they can improve them for the next Sprints.
Agile Manifesto
It is a document published by a community of Agile experts with 10 Agile principles. GitScrum has also written the GitScrum Agile Manifesto with its version of them.
Agile Product Delivery
It is an approach focused on the customer, to build and release a continuous flow of valuable products and services.
Agile Software Development
It’s the application of the agile methodology by developers to create software in limited time. They break massive work down into shorter cycles called sprints, milestones or iterations.
Agile Teams
They are cross-functional groups of professionals who build, test and deliver products and increments in short time boxes.
Agile Transformation
It’s the process of evolving as individuals and organizations to the agile mindset, which means comprehending and applying the benefits of organizational agility.
Agile Release Train (ART)
It is a structure of several Agile software development teams working on large-scale projects. It’s a team of (5-12) Agile teams, who plan, execute and release value together. It usually has 50-125 people.
Assignment
In your project management tool, like GitScrum, an assignment is a duty, a responsibility. When you delegate a task to a team member, he/she then has an assignment and must accomplish it until the due date.
Attachment(s)
These are add-ons on projects or tasks, that allow you to make communication more complete for complex tasks. You can attach files like guides, manuals and models to guide your team member(s) during task execution.
B
Backlog
A list of requirements, updates and troubleshooting that users request. The product owner handles a prioritized list, deciding which backlog items the team needs to work on. After each iteration, the backlog is updated with new features and user suggestions.
Board
In your project management tool, you will find GitScrum Board. A collaborative board that brings a modern version of kanban boards, where you can include and control your team’s weekly and daily tasks. It allows you to place tasks into labeled columns and move them forward, as long as you accomplish them (from “to do”, to “doing”, then “done” for example).
Bottleneck
Bottlenecks are any matters that get in the way of the development cycle, slowing or stopping it. When you analyze workflow, tasks must follow a natural progress according to their estimated duration. When you identify a lot of tasks get stuck at the same cycle stage, then you have a bottleneck and need to check its cause.
Burndown Chart
This Chart is used in project management tools, integrated with Sprints (time boxed sessions you associate with project’s goals). It shows you the actual team performance daily, in comparison to the expected one. This way, you can monitor how well your collaborators are doing, offer support and encourage them to make adjustments, before the Sprint deadline.
Business Agility
It is the competence to work efficiently in the digital age, quickly adapting to market changes with disruptive innovations.
C
Cadence
The number of days or weeks you define for a Sprint; the duration of the team’s development cycle.
Code Highlights
This resource helps to make tasks and communication among programmers and developers more dynamic, since they can spot parts of their work (the code) faster when they are formatted in different colors.
Comments
In your project management tool, Comments are a resource to help faster execution of the tasks. They allow quickly adding meaningful tips to the original task description, without wasting time with phone calls or long chats.
Collaborate
In project management, collaborating means working together in a task or a project, towards the same goal(s) and seeking for a solution.
Collaborative Features
In your GitScrum project management tool, when we talk about collaborative features, we mean features that facilitate communication, working and creating together. Just like the GitScrum Board, GitScrum Wiki, GitScrum Mind Mapping, discussions.
Compliance
It is a set of disciplines for teams to apply Lean-Agile development and build systems that meet both high standard quality, and regulatory/legal guidelines.
Customers
They are the persons who buy and/or use products and services from a company. Therefore, they are the product value beneficiaries.
Customer Centricity
It is it is the orientation of companies to work focused on customers and to deliver the best experiences and products to them.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
It’s a marketing term, but you might eventually see it related with project management. It includes the activities of companies to manage customer data and to keep in touch with these customers, including after sales contacts.
(Task) Custom Fields
In your GitScrum project management tool, you use custom fields to customize tasks and make them more specific to your team members. This way, you adapt task requirements to your business needs and make production flow faster, since your collaborators will ask and receive exactly the data they need to update your products.
D
Daily Scrum
Daily meeting the Scrum master hosts. The Scrum (team) have a presidential meeting or a video-call to discuss the ongoing issues (what went on yesterday, and what they plan to do the present day).
Design Thinking
It’s is a visual development process that focuses on reshaping businesses based on the customers, long-term sustainability and profitability.
Development Value Streams (DVS)
It’s the roadmap of activities you elaborate to convert a business idea into a valid digital solution. For example, DVS are important for design devices, software apps, and e-commerce websites.
DevOps
It is a set of practices and a culture that aims to automate the processes between all professionals involved in the development process, which means, keep close integration between developers and IT teams.
Discussions
Discussions are an interactive/collaborative feature in your project management tool – Gitscrum. You can use it to talk about important work topics you are developing and collaborating with your team, and exchange ideas with them. It’s a chat inside your project management tool, with the advantage that you can keep the discussions history to check later, all there.
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
An Agile framework that aims to enable the delivery of high-quality products faster. It is a hybrid combination of Lean and Agile methodologies like Agile modeling, Kanban, XP, Scrum, and Unified Process.
Domain Name System (DNS)
It is an address system used by your web host to transform your domain address into an IP (Internet Protocol). You will need to use your DNS to configure your GitScrum White Label, to personalize your project management tool.
E
Effort Template
This is a project management feature present in GitScrum. You can use it to standardize different task types, according to their size, complexity and effort level. Sort your recurring tasks and use effort templates to attribute point values for each accomplishment fairly.
Enterprise
It is the business that owns the SAFe portfolio.
Enterprise Architect
This professional is responsible for establishing a strategy to enable a portfolio to support current and future business capabilities.
Epic Owners
They are responsible for coordinating the portfolio Epics on the Portfolio Kanban system. They collaborate to define the epic, its Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and Lean business case. After approval, they facilitate the implementation.
Epics
An epic is a complex development solution divided into smaller tasks or user stories based on the end-user needs. Epics require the definition of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and they must be approved by Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) before implemented.
Essential SAFe
Essential SAFe is the most basic form of the Scaled Agile Framework. It involves the minimal set of roles and events for agile teams to deliver value continuously via an Agile Release Train (ART).
Estimation
Agile estimation is an assessment of the probable necessary effort to complete a project task (in hours, minutes or story points).
F
Favicon
It’s an icon image of your logo, saved in the (.ico) format (although you will upload it in .jpg, .png or .gif in GitScrum). It is disclosed in websites and in your personalized project management tool (configured GitScrum White Label) beside the browser address bar.
Features
It is a functionality or a service that fulfills a user’s need. To define a feature, developers consider the benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria.
Foundation
It is a documentation basis with principles and roles that support the implementation and leadership during development to deliver value successfully at scale.
Full SAFe
This is the most comprehensive Scaled Agile Framework. It is normally used for complex solutions with hundreds of people and dozens of teams working to deliver the product.
G
Gamification
It’s the act of using games to engage workers or customers. In project management, gamification is associated with recognition, gradual rewards and bringing fun into the remote work environment. With GitScrum, you can easily create a gamification program for your team, associate it with other productivity features and reward your top performers.
Gantt Charts
It’s a graphic display of your projects, used in project management, which uses the waterfall format. It is still very popular these days, to check overall activities of a team, since it can show multiple projects’ data on a single screen. You can see tasks to start and to end in all your projects at a glance.
I
Impediment
It’s an obstacle or difficulty that could reduce the agile team’s productivity or get in the way of their accomplishments (communication issues, conflicts, distractions). It’s up to the Scrum master to help the team remove impediments.
Invoices
It’s a billing document that includes a report of your worked tasks. You can use GitScrum to issue Invoices to your clients, with complete reports of your billable hours and tracked jobs. This helps you to save time on administrative tasks, ensure transparency and profitability.
Iteration
Iterations are the basic piece of Agile development. Each iteration has a fixed duration timebox, where Agile Teams work to deliver product increments, software and add-ons. The usual lenght of the iteration is two weeks, but it can vary from one to four weeks as well.
Iteration Execution
That’s how Agile Teams coordinate their operations during the timebox, so they can deliver high-standard products.
Iteration Goals
They are a technical summary of the goals the Agile Team deals to achieve in an Iteration. They are essential for the Agile Release Train (ART) as an autonomous team of teams.
Iteration Planning
An event where all team members define the number of deliveries for the next Iteration. The team determines the work as a list of Iteration Goals.
Iteration Retrospective
A regular event where Agile Team members assess the results of the previous Iteration, and discuss ways to improve practices.
Iteration Review
The Iteration Review is an event for teams to inspect the increment they did, and make backlog adjustments.
K
Kanban
It is a visual workflow management method, invented by the Japanese Taichii Ohno in 1953. Kanban is used as an agile framework, since it allows visual spotting and avoiding bottlenecks: you can limit the number of tasks that is acceptable under a stage, in a production or development cycle.
Kanban Board(s)
It’s a visual board that is formatted into columns. Each column represents a task stage (‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, and ‘Done’, for instance). On Kanban boards, you visualize tasks as cards. Every time team members finish a task, they move it to the corresponding column.
L
Labels
They are a visual resource to help your team work more efficiently by easily identifying task types and priorital work. In GitScrum, you can label tasks by type, according to your working area and recurring demands.
Lean-Agile Principles
Economic and sustainable concepts that inspire SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
Lean / Lean Development
A set of guidelines and best practices that makes the development process more agile and sustainable. Its precursor was the lean manufacturing method, first used by Toyota in the 50s.
Lean Budget
An agile financial approach that optimizes resources usage, reduces excessive costs and seeks sustainability and profitability, with project accounting.
Lean Start-up
Lean startup is the process of developing a product or company based on the customer needs, expressed at market analysis and tests. The lean startup validates products before releasing them. They research and check the consumers’ interest.
M
Market Place
In the Internet, market place is an electronic store where you can download apps, templates and other virtual items. GitScrum Market Place offers you thousands of free workflow templates, and more, to use and customize with your projects!
Mentions
In project management tools and their collaborative features, like the GitScrum Board, mentions are commonly used. They are a resource to recall your colleague’s attention at the Comment’s area. To make a mention, just like in social media, you simply type @ and your colleague’s name. For example: “@john, take a look at this!”.
Metrics
Metrics are measures of assessment used for tracking performance or production. In project management, you can measure productivity between weeks, and among workers, with the intention to promote progress.
Milestones
Milestones are markers that you associate with project goals, like Sprints. In SAFe, milestones can be Program Increments (PI), fixed-dates, or learning milestones.
Mind Maps / Mind Mapping
It is a type of diagram, systematized by the English psychologist Tony Buzan. Mind Mapping is the activity of drawing mind maps. Because of this didactic efficiency, this technique became very popular, and helps thousands of people daily at planning a variety of businesses, worldwide. In your GitScrum project management tool, you can draw Mind Maps for your company chart, portfolio, editorial planning, working areas, and many other applications.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The simplest version of a product that you can release with a minimal amount of effort and development.
N
Notifications
A very useful resource in your project management tool (as other apps). They warn you when a task is assigned to you, or when a task that you delegated was completed, for instance. Use Gitscrum as a virtual platform to communicate with your team.
O
Operational value streams (OVS)
The roadmap of activities to release a product/service to the customer (product manufacturing, purchase order, offering an educational service like a course).
Organizational Agility
The adherence of an enterprise/company and its teams to agile and lean principles, becoming able to quickly respond to changes and opportunities in the digital age. Learn more on organizational agility.
P
Portfolio
The set of solutions and services offered by an enterprise or a company.
Product Backlog
A list of requirements, updates and troubleshooting that users request. The product owner handles a prioritized list, deciding which backlog items the team needs to work on. After each iteration, the backlog is updated with new features and user suggestions.
Product Owner
The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team (or Scrum team), responsible for organizing and prioritizing User Stories and the Team Backlog, to define the product increments the team will work on.
Product Manager
This Manager is responsible for the strategical definition of which products are viable and meet the customers’ needs, and also assisting the agile team with the development to ensure the deliveries in time.
R
Release Plan
It’s a document that includes all the features that the agile team must deliver during a determined period of time, until the next release. It usually lasts a few months.
Roadmap
It’s a script with a plan of Sprints and project deliveries in due dates.
S
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
It is a set of organization and workflow standards designed to guide companies in scaling up agile and lean practices.
Scrum
“Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products in a complex environment.”, according to its authors Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. It is designed for teams of 10- members, who break massive work into smaller chunks that can be completed within timed iterations, called sprints.
Scrum at Scale
Scrum@Scale is a framework that allows organizations to grow gradually, coordinating an unlimited number of scrum teams. Read more.
Scrum of Scrums
Scrum of Scrums (SoS) is a tool that allows the division of a large Scrum team into several smaller Scrums teams. It is a team composed of up to nine people who need to constantly interact with each other to build a final product.
Scrum Master
The Scrum Master is the Scrum team leader and is responsible for advocating about the project, providing guidance to the team and the business owner to ensure all practices are followed.
Solutions
Solutions are products, services, systems or goods that a company delivers to the customer.
Subtask
It is a smaller part of a task that you split in your project management tool. Create subtasks under a task to organize complex tasks, allow partial accomplishments and engage your collaborators with small progress.
Sprints
Sprints are time-boxed sessions of tasks that you can associate with project goals in project management. They are a key element for Scrum teams. Team leaders create Sprints to ensure deliveries, monitor accomplishments and engage the team, since they form a challenging feature.
Spreadsheet
They are calculation tables, as in any software suite. They are present in GitScrum software management tool, to facilitate your project organization and access to project data. Create spreadsheets without having to open external apps, right in your projects.
Squad(s)
Squads are teams. This term became popular with the Spotify company, which inspired many other businesses with the Spotify Model and its corporate culture. They stood up for investing in the squads’ autonomy and self-management. Learn more.
T
Task
In project management, it’s a small part of your work or project. A duty/responsibility that becomes an assignment from the moment that is delegated to a team member.
Task Checklist
In your project management tool, like GitScrum, you can create a task checklist under a task. This is useful for tasks that contain many items that need to be checked. It is different from a subtask:
Task checklist – you do one task, and check the items of the list.
Subtasks – you do subtasks separately, one by one.
Task Effort
Your GitScrum project management tool has a feature that allows you to measure task effort, which is useful for you to assess the size and complexity of a task. Once you check the level of the task effort, you will create the Effort Template, to standardize the level of effort for that task. Defining effort templates based on task efforts will help you to distribute work fairly, reward collaborators and charge for your work properly.
Time Tracking
The activity of measuring the time you need to accomplish a task is the name of another GitScrum feature. It is helpful to hold all your tasks accountable and billable. Once you tracked all your tasks, they will be ready to be charged with GitScrum Invoices.
(Task) Custom Fields
In your GitScrum project management tool, you use custom fields to customize tasks and make them more specific to your team members. This way, you adapt task requirements to your business needs and make production flow faster, since your collaborators will ask and receive exactly the data they need to update your products.
U
User Stories
These are short reports that come from forms that tell users’ and workers’ needs. They were created by the software industry but today all kinds of businesses use them. There might be a few or a lot of employees in charge of writing user stories in your company. The Agile team will receive them, prioritize them and transform them into increments requests.
User Stories Priority (Templates)
The product manager and product owner organize the user stories’ priority with the team, and define which customers’ requests will be fulfilled first. For this organization, they apply User Story Priority templates, something that’s available for free at GitScrum Market Place, for all our users.
UX
This is an acronym for User Experience. Something essential for all industries today, especially those who have already awakened to the digital and customer-centric age.
V/W
Value
When you hear about “delivering value to the customer” in Agile and Scrum teams, it means delivering relevant benefits that the customer perceives and cares about. From this standpoint, adding an upgrade to a product that’s not important for the customer is considered waste, rather than value.
Workflow
It’s the sequence of stages of your project tasks. It can be a development cycle, a production cycle or a creation cycle. You can adapt or create the workflow according to your working area, and use GitScrum for this.
Workflow Templates
These templates are pre-built models of workflow that work properly for several business areas and applications – software development, events, simple tasks, marketing, design, etc. GitScrum users can choose from a wide range of free Workflow templates to use for their businesses, customize them and replace them any time.
White Label
This is a GitScrum feature that allows you full customization of your project management tool. Just like you had developed your own exclusive tool. It lets you replace the developer logo by YOUR logo, use your logo on a favicon, use your domain and subdomains, and your corporate email.
X
XP (Extreme Programming)
A methodology in which software developers have to complete a working product in 1-2 weeks, in comparison to the usual 2-4 week iteration. Like the name says, they take the Scrum practices to an extreme level, to ensure the deliveries. Learn more.
References (adapted from):
Dummies.com, Investopedia.com, © Scaled Agile, Inc.