Agile
31 entries in Agile.
Showing 31 of 31 · sorted by a–z
Acceptance Criteria
The specific, testable conditions a deliverable must meet before the customer accepts it — the contract between a team and the person who will sign off the work.
Backlog Refinement
The ongoing practice of clarifying, splitting, estimating, and ordering items on a product backlog so the team always has a healthy queue of ready work for upcoming sprints or releases.
Burn-Down Chart
A time-series chart showing remaining work against time, used by agile teams to visualise sprint or release progress and forecast completion.
Continuous Integration
The engineering practice of merging code changes into a shared mainline many times a day and verifying each merge with automated builds and tests.
Cumulative Flow Diagram
A stacked-area chart of work items in each stage over time — the single most informative chart in lean and Kanban flow management.
Daily Stand-up
A short, focused, time-boxed daily meeting where the delivery team aligns on progress, plans the next 24 hours of work, and surfaces blockers.
Definition of Done
A shared, written checklist that defines what 'done' means for a unit of work — the single most important quality discipline in agile delivery.
Definition of Ready (DoR)
The shared team agreement about the minimum characteristics a backlog item must have before it can be pulled into a sprint.
DevOps
The cultural and engineering practice of merging software development and operations into a single, continuous flow — automating build, test, deploy, monitoring, and feedback to ship software faster and more reliably.
Epic
A large body of work in agile delivery that delivers significant business value but is too big for a single sprint — decomposed into features and user stories that flow through the team over weeks or months.
Feature Flag
A configuration-driven switch that lets teams turn software features on or off in production without redeploying — decoupling deploy from release and making rollback a single config change.
Hotfix Deployment
An expedited release used to correct a serious production defect — sized small, scoped narrowly, deployed quickly, and recorded carefully so the urgency does not become a habit.
Iteration Planning
The team-level meeting that turns a prioritized backlog into a credible, committed plan for the next sprint — balancing capacity, dependencies, and the definition of done.
Kanban
A pull-based work management method that visualises flow on a board, limits work-in-progress, and improves delivery through measured experiments rather than fixed iterations.
Lead Time vs Cycle Time
Two closely related flow metrics — lead time measures from customer request to delivery; cycle time measures from active work start to delivery.
Mob Programming
A whole-team development style where everyone works on the same problem at the same time on one screen — the extreme form of pair programming, used to crush complex problems and spread knowledge fast.
Pair Programming
A collaborative engineering practice where two developers work together at one workstation — one driving, one navigating — to build higher-quality software with continuous review and knowledge transfer.
Refactoring
The disciplined practice of changing the internal structure of code without changing its external behaviour — improving design, reducing complexity, and paying down technical debt without altering functionality.
Release Train
A cadence-based delivery pattern — most closely associated with SAFe's Agile Release Train — that coordinates multiple agile teams to plan, build, and release on a shared, predictable rhythm.
Spike (Agile)
A time-boxed investigation used when a story cannot be estimated or designed without further research or prototyping.
Sprint Retrospective
A time-boxed agile ceremony at the end of each sprint where the team inspects how it worked together and commits to specific improvements for the next sprint.
Sprint Zero
A short pre-delivery sprint used to establish the environment, tooling, backlog, and team norms needed before productive delivery sprints begin.
Story Points
A relative, unitless estimate of effort that captures complexity, uncertainty, and volume in a single number — and works only when teams resist the urge to convert them back into hours.
Story Slicing
The craft of breaking a large user story into smaller stories that each deliver end-to-end value, fit within a sprint, and can be independently accepted.
Swarming
The practice of temporarily concentrating a whole team on a single high-priority item — story, incident, or blocker — until it is finished, rather than working many items in parallel.
Technical Debt
The accumulated cost of expedient engineering decisions — the metaphorical interest you pay every time you change a system that was built quickly rather than carefully.
Test-Driven Development
An engineering discipline of writing a failing test before the code that makes it pass — producing better-designed, better-tested software at a sustainable pace.
User Story Mapping
A two-dimensional technique for visualising the user journey across the top axis and the depth of functionality down the axis — used to slice releases by value rather than by component.
Velocity
An agile team's empirical measure of how much work it completes per sprint — used to forecast capacity for upcoming sprints, not to compare or judge teams.
WIP Limit (Work in Progress Limit)
A cap on how many items a team may have in progress at once — the single most effective policy for improving flow.
WIP Limits
A Kanban discipline that caps the number of work items in progress at each stage, forcing teams to finish before starting and exposing the bottlenecks that quietly destroy flow.