In November 2013, my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide (A Smart Travel Companion)” was published. I added a Scrum Glossary in appendix A of the book. I explained the terms that I consider essential in the Scrum framework, holding e.g. that I would never translate these.
I felt it was a good idea to share my Scrum Glossary here too:
- Burn-down Chart: a chart showing the evolution of remaining effort against time.
- Daily Scrum: daily, time-boxed event to re-plan the development work during a Sprint. It serves for the Development Team to inspect the daily progress and update the Sprint backlog.
- Definition of done: a list of expectations that software must live up to in order to be released into production.
- Development Team: the role within a Scrum Team accountable for doing incremental development work, with the aim of creating a releasable Increment every Sprint.
- Emergence: the process of the coming into existence or prominence of unforeseen facts or knowledge of a fact, a previously unknown fact, or knowledge of a fact becoming visible unexpectedly.
- Empiricism: a process control type in which decisions are based on observation, experience and experimentation. Empiricism has three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation.
- Engineering standards: a set of development and technology standards that a Development Team applies to create releasable Increments of software.
- Increment: a piece of working software that adds to previously created Increments, and -as a whole – forms a software product.
- Product Backlog: a list of the work to be done in order to create, maintain and sustain a software product.
- Product Backlog refinement: the activity in a Sprint through which the Product Owner and the Development Team add granularity to Product Backlog.
- Product Owner: the role within a Scrum Team accountable for incrementally managing and expressing business and functional expectations for a product.
- Scrum Master: the role within a Scrum Team that is accountable for guiding, coaching, teaching and assisting a Scrum Team and its environments in the proper use of Scrum.
- Scrum Team: a team consisting of a Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master.
- Scrum Values: a set of fundamental values and qualities underpinning the Scrum framework was created.
- Sprint: time-boxed event that serves as a container for the other Scrum events.
- Sprint Backlog: an overview of the development work to realize the Sprint’s goal.
- Sprint Goal: a short phrase describing the purpose of a Sprint.
- Sprint Planning: time-boxed event to start a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the work that’s most valuable to be done next and design that work into Sprint backlog.
- Sprint Retrospective: time-boxed event to end a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the past Sprint and update the process for the next Sprint.
- Sprint Review: time-boxed event to end the development work of a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team and the stakeholders to inspect the Increment resulting from the Sprint, the impact of overall progress and update the Product backlog.
- Stakeholder: a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that is required for incremental discovery.
- Velocity: indication of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint by a Scrum Team.
On Scrum.org you will also find a Scrum glossary. To be honest, I never checked mine against the one on the Scrum.org website.
