Agile Methodology Glossary, Terminology | Part-1

A-M

A

Adaptive

Flexibility, embraces uncertainty, complexity, change as opportunity to resolve and improve in overall project execution.

Acceptance Criteria (AC)Set of predefined requirements that must be met to mark a user story as complete and accepted by customer.

Acceptance Test

The process of functionally testing a user story at implementation phase, ideally verify that a system meet all of it's functional and non-functional business requirements.

Automated Build

Accelerate time consuming build steps, which can lead to faster deployment and fewer human error. A process to convert source code files into final product without human intervention.

B

Backlog Refinement

Process of reviewing, editing, ranking your product / software requirements. It helps to prioritize product feature that customer wants.

Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

Developed a feature around user expected behavior. It's a test-first practice that involves documenting and design application. Focus on collaboration between developer, testers, and business stakeholders.

Burn-down Chart

Using tool to find work is completed and work to be done in a given time. It's a work vs timeBBurn-up Chart

Using tool to find total work versus how much work is completed. It helps to forecast expected date to completion date. It's total work v/s completed work

C

Collaborative

It's one of principle of Agile, an effective way to build solution to complex problem using communication, incremental iteration, pairing and teamwork.

Continuous Learning

A training process that involves ongoing education and training for individuals and teams to improve their skills and knowledge. Forster training, innovations and experiments. Boost employee engagement and retention.

Continuous Integration

A critical technical practice in agile. Steps involved - Plan, Code, Build, Test, merge code in a Central Repository and ready and deploy to staging environment (all non-production environment).

Continuous Deployment

A critical step in a agile and DevOps, and it starts where Continuous Integration ends. Allows teams to automatically deploy small, incremental changes to production as soon as passes the test. Core steps involves - Deploy, Operate, Monitor/Feedback

Class Responsibility Collaborators - CRC Card

It's a technique and brainstorming tool to model and teach object-oriented concepts. Used during the design phase of software system development. Extreme programming practitioners recommend this.

Daily Meeting

A stand-up meeting is a daily meeting in agile team. Provide an opportunity to share a daily updates, discuss project progress at a high level, and identify blockers. These meetings last 15 minutes and allow each contributor to report on their accomplishments since the last stand-up meeting. It ensures everyone is aligned and knows what's going on.

Definition of Done (DoD)

A set of criteria that product team must met before backlog item can be considered complete. It's a checklist that helps the team understand what's required to make a product releasable. Typically defined by Scrum Master or Engineering Manager but it should be a collaborative effort.

Definition of Ready (DoR)

A set of criteria that determines if a task or user story is ready for a team to work on. It helps to plan the work, avoid working on features without clear completion criteria, create clarity about backlog items.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Focus on short development life cycle that targets speed and simplicity. It's a framework that focuses on high quality software through collaboration, adaptation, and frequent feedback. XP emphasizes rapid development, and deployment and a close working relationship between customer, stakeholders, and development team.

Epic

A large, complex body of work that broken down into a smaller user stories and task. Epic often encompass multiple teams, on multiple projects, and can even be tracked on multiple board. Epics are always delivered over a set of splints.

Estimation

A collaborative process that evaluates the amount of work needed to complete a task in the product backlog. An expert opinions about when a piece of work can be completed based on its complexity. few estimation techniques are - 1) Planning Poker 2) T-shirt sizing 3) The bucket system 4) Affinity Mapping 5) Random Distribution 6) Dot Voting 7) Big, Uncertain, Small 8) Top-down Estimate 9) Bottom-up Estimate 10)Three-point Estimate

Exploratory Testing

A tester looking for a bugs in an application without having a script. Using domain expertise, new discovery and creativity to find defects, vulnerability and usability issues. Steps involved: product learning, outcome learning execution, and reiterate. It is difficult to automate and scale, as it is person dependent.

F

Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Highly customer-centric, iterative, and incremental agile software development. It's a feature driven development applies to a large scale, complex and long-term projects. How different it is from scrum : fewer meetings than scrum, more comprehensive documentation than scrum, shorter iteration than scrum, iterative process, frequent user feedback, quick delivery cycles, should be able to complete in a 2 week timeframe.

Fast Fail

It's a fundamental principle in Agile, identifying and addressing failure as early as possible in iterative development cycle. Ideal goals are to identify failure, improve product quality, stabilized platform, and achieve customer satisfaction and product success. It's a not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.

H

Heartbeat Retrospective

It is an interim retrospective meetings that happens regularly explicitly reflecting the most important events occurred since the previous meeting. The goal of meeting to identify ways to improve or remediate and decisions are made accordingly.

I

Incremental Development

It's a strategy where product successive versions are usable and build on the previous version. This is also called vertical development. This one is completely opposite to waterfall model. A developer break down the entire project requirements into a small module, and further split the work for a module in iteration. Multiple iteration helps to keep up with the defects in check.

Integration

It's an approach to the integration of a new tool with existing software system. It allows those microservices to be dropped into the architecture seamlessly or to be removed or updated without disrupting other services. Routing, orchestration, messaging or data services are the points where a new service interacts with the environment.

INVEST

It's a guide, checklist and acronym used in agile to check the quality of user stories. I : Independent, N : Negotiable, V : Valuable, E ; Estimate, S : Small, T : Testable Independent: The story is not dependent on other stories Negotiable: The story prompts a solution but doesn't prescribe one Valuable: The story clearly explains the benefit it provides to users Estimable: The story provides enough detail for the development team to estimate its size Small: The story is the smallest piece of work that can deliver useful software

Iteration

A short period of time in which a small task is developed and tested. Developed a small chunk and verify and test. It usually falls between 1 to 4 weeks long and often aligned with calendar week. Each iteration has a set completion date. As the scaled agile framework puts it, iterations are the basic building block of agile development.

Iterative Development

It's a process that involves breaking down a big story, task, requirement into a smaller build blocks which can be manageable, refined, repeated, researched throughout the software development cycle. Essentially, evolved over the time.

K

Kanban

It's a popular agile project management framework that uses visual tasks to manage workflow. The world "Kanban" is Japanese for visual card. In Kanban team uses digital or physical board is a visual tool that helps team to optimize their workflow by representing work items visually, limit work-in-progress and maximize efficiency. The team can see the state of the work anytime on the board. It requires real-time communication of capacity and full transparency of work.

Kanban Board

In Kanban, team uses digital or physical board which is a visual tool that helps team to optimize their workflow by representing work items visually, limit work-in-progress and maximize efficiency. It is quite popular in DevOps teams.

L

Lead Time

It's a total time it takes to complete a work item, from the start to finish. One more understanding is, measure the time from the moment the customer makes a request to the time they receive something.

M

Milestone Retrospective

It's a meeting where a team discusses a project's significant events and any structural issues that need to be addressed after a set period of time or at the end of a project. It's a complete formal meeting which has core structure before began the meeting. This meeting includes : long-term or strategic viability of the project, healthy work relationships among team members, or governance concerns.

Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF)

It's a subset of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), smallest set of functionality that customer need to see value in a product. It's not a popular in software development arena.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

In agile, MVP is a version of a product that has enough feature to test the product's vision and gain feedback for future iterations. Build a product with enough features which attracts early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early before going to full fledge product release. It saves time, money and effort before committing to a larger product objectives.

Mob programming

It's an approach where entire team works together on the same task at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer. It's quiet close to pair programming but with more people involved. It's a true collaborative team.

Mock Objects

It's a type of test double used to create a controlled testing environment by simulating the behavior of dependencies. They are often used in automated unit tests to isolate a particular module or component and verify that it behaves as expected.

Note: I have prepare this list with the best of my lived experiences, and quite helpful for a someone who has just started (beginner) with an Agile Methodology and Development.

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