Scrum Vocabulary (updated)

Driven by the prospect of an Italian translation of my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” I decided to revise it slightly; minor tweaks of words and terms, although a lot of them.

As part of my revision, I also updated the Scrum Vocabulary of my book:

• Burn-down Chart: a chart showing the decrease of remaining work against time.
• Burn-up Chart: a chart showing the increase of a parameter, e.g. value, against time.
• Daily Scrum: a daily event, time-boxed to 15 minutes or less, to re-plan the development work during a Sprint. The event serves for the Development Team to share the daily progress, plan the work for the next 24 hours and update Sprint Backlog accordingly.
• Definition of Done: a set of expectations and qualities that a product must exhibit to make it fit for a release in production.
• Development standards: the set of standards and practices that a Development Team identifies as needed to create releasable Increments of product no later than by the end of a Sprint.
• Development Team: the group of people accountable for all incremental development work needed to create a releasable Increment no later than by the end of a 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: the process control type in which decisions are based on observed results, experience and experimentation. Empiricism implements regular inspections and adaptations requiring and creating transparency. Also referred to as ’empirical process control’.
• Forecast: the anticipation of a future trend based on observations of the past, like the selection of Product Backlog people believe they can deliver in a Sprint or in future Sprints for future Product Backlog.
• Increment: a candidate of releasable work that adds to previously created Increments, and – as a whole – forms a product.
• Product Backlog: an ordered, evolving list of all work deemed necessary by the Product Owner to create, maintain and sustain a product.
• Product Backlog refinement: the activity in a Sprint through which the Product Owner and the Development Team add granularity to future Product Backlog.
• Product Owner: the person accountable for optimising the value a product delivers by incrementally managing and expressing all product expectations and ideas in a Product Backlog; the single representative of all stakeholders.
• Scrum (n): a simple framework for complex product delivery (1); a simple framework for complex problem management (2).
• Scrum Master: the person accountable for fostering an environment of Scrum by guiding, coaching, teaching and facilitating one or more Scrum Teams and their environment in understanding and employing Scrum.
• Scrum Team: the combined roles of Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master.
• Scrum Values: a set of 5 fundamental values and qualities underpinning the Scrum framework; commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage.
• Sprint: an event that serves as a container for the other Scrum events, time-boxed to 4 weeks or less. The event serves getting a sufficient amount of work done, while ensuring timely inspection, reflection and adaptation at a product and strategic level. The other Scrum events are Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.
• Sprint Backlog: an evolving overview of the development deemed necessary to realize a Sprint’s goal.
• Sprint Goal: a concise statement expressing the overarching purpose of a Sprint.
• Sprint Planning: an event marking the start of a Sprint, time-boxed to 8 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the Product Backlog considered most valuable and design that forecast into an initial Sprint backlog against an overarching Sprint Goal.
• Sprint Retrospective: an event marking the closing of a Sprint, time-boxed to 3 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the past Sprint and establish the way of working for the next Sprint.
• Sprint Review: an event marking the closing of the development of a Sprint, time-boxed to 4 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team and the stakeholders to inspect the Increment, the overall progress and strategic changes in order to allow the Product Owner to update the Product Backlog.
• Stakeholder: a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in or knowledge of a product that is required for the further incremental evolution of the product.
• Time-box: a container in time of a maximum duration, potentially a fixed duration. In Scrum all events have a maximum duration only, except for the Sprint itself which has a fixed duration.
• Velocity: popular indication of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of releasable product during a Sprint by a specific (composition of a) Scrum Team. Serves as an aid for the Development Team of the Scrum Team to forecast future Sprints.

I look forward to the Italian version seeing the light of day in 2018. I translated my book (2013) to Dutch in 2016 as “Scrum Wegwijzer“. It was published in German as “Scrum Taschenbuch” (translated by Peter Goetz and Uwe Schirmer) in 2017.

You can still find the Scrum Glossary of those editions on my blog.