The vocabulary around daily standups and the agile ceremonies, roles, and artifacts that surround them.
The specific, testable conditions a story has to meet to be considered complete.
Standup done by posting updates in a channel or tool instead of meeting live.
The full list of work the team could do — everything not yet finished, roughly prioritized.
The recurring session where the team cleans up the backlog — clarifying vague tickets, re-prioritizing, splitting oversized stories, deleting stuff nobody wants anymore.
Same thing as grooming — some teams prefer this term because 'grooming' has an unfortunate secondary meaning.
Anything stopping a piece of work from moving forward that the person can't resolve alone.
A chart showing remaining work in the sprint over time — ideally trending down to zero by the last day.
Like a burndown chart but tracking completed work trending up — and it also shows if scope itself increased mid-sprint.
The regular rhythm of a team's meetings and cycles — daily standup, weekly planning, biweekly retro.
How much work the team can realistically take on this specific sprint, accounting for holidays, on-call, meetings, and people being out.
Same thing as rollover — unfinished work carried into the next sprint.
Scrum's term for any of the recurring scheduled meetings — planning, standup, review, retro.
Splitting sprint work into what the team is confident it'll finish (committed) versus extra work it'll pick up if there's time left over (stretch).
A team with all the skills it needs to ship something end-to-end, without depending on another team for every piece.
The official Scrum term for standup. Same meeting, fancier name in the Scrum Guide.
The team's agreed checklist for when a piece of work actually counts as finished — not just coded, but tested, reviewed, deployed, whatever the team decided.
The checklist a ticket has to pass before it's allowed into a sprint — clear acceptance criteria, no open questions, properly sized.
A big chunk of work too large for one sprint, made up of multiple smaller stories.
A separate, smaller conversation spun out of something raised in standup that needed more than a sentence.
Scrum's word for blocker. Same thing, and the Scrum Master's job is specifically to clear these.
A flow-based alternative to Scrum — no fixed sprints, work moves continuously through columns on a board, limited by WIP limits instead of time-boxed iterations.
The informal list of topics that come up in standup but get pushed to a separate conversation so the meeting stays short.
An estimation exercise where everyone privately picks a point value and reveals at the same time, to avoid anchoring on the first number said out loud.
The complete, prioritized backlog for the whole product, owned by the Product Owner.
The person who owns the product backlog and decides what gets prioritized and why, based on what's valuable to users and the business.
A concrete, assigned change agreed on in retro — not just a complaint, an actual thing someone owns doing.
Work that doesn't get finished in a sprint and gets pushed into the next one.
Standup format where each person speaks in turn, usually in the same order every day.
Work quietly getting added to a sprint after it's already started, without anyone officially replanning.
The most common agile framework — fixed-length sprints, defined roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, dev team), and a set ceremony cadence: planning, daily scrum, review, retro.
The person responsible for running the ceremonies, clearing impediments, and protecting the team from process nonsense — not a manager, not a project lead.
A mashup of Scrum and Kanban — sprints and ceremonies from Scrum, continuous flow and WIP limits from Kanban.
Everyone updates their own tickets on the board first, then the group only talks out loud about blockers.
A time-boxed task meant to answer a question or reduce uncertainty — not to ship anything, just to figure out how something should be built.
A fixed time window — usually one or two weeks — where the team commits to finishing a set chunk of work.
The specific slice of the product backlog the team committed to for the current sprint.
The one-sentence reason the sprint's work matters — what the team is actually trying to accomplish, not just the list of tickets.
The meeting at the start of a sprint where the team picks which backlog items to commit to and roughly how they'll get done.
End-of-sprint meeting about how the team worked, not what it built — what went well, what didn't, what to change next sprint.
End-of-sprint meeting where the team demos what got built to stakeholders and gets feedback.
A small, semi-autonomous cross-functional team, popularized by Spotify's org model — same idea as a scrum team, different label.
Anyone outside the immediate team with an interest in what's being built — a client, an exec, another team depending on the output.
A short daily sync where each person says what they did, what they're doing next, and what's blocking them. Fifteen minutes, tops — if it's running long, it's turned into a status meeting.
The point where standup becomes background noise — people show up but stop actually listening or engaging.
Rotating who facilitates standup each day or week, instead of always having the Scrum Master run it.
A report on what you've done, as opposed to a discussion about what's blocking you.
A relative unit for estimating effort — not hours, just a rough comparison of how big one story is versus another.
Generic term for any short meeting whose purpose is just getting everyone on the same page — standup is one specific kind of sync.
An estimation method where stories get sized as XS/S/M/L/XL instead of numeric points — rougher, faster, no false precision.
A smaller piece of work, often a subtask under a bigger story or ticket.
Shortcuts taken to ship faster now that cost extra work to clean up later.
The classic standup format: what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, what's blocking you.
A single trackable unit of work in whatever tool the team uses — Jira, Linear, Asana, whatever.
A hard cap on how long something gets — standup is time-boxed to 15 minutes, meaning it ends at 15 minutes whether or not everyone's finished talking.
A piece of work written from the user's point of view, usually in the format 'As a [user], I want [thing], so that [reason].'
How many story points a team typically finishes per sprint, averaged over recent sprints.
Running standup by going column by column on the board instead of person by person — you talk about a ticket, not about yourself.
A cap on how many items can sit in a given column (like 'In Progress') at once, forcing the team to finish things before starting new ones.
A ticket that's technically in progress but hasn't actually moved in days or weeks — nobody's touching it, but nobody's closed it either.