Agile Pain Relief Consulting

Agile Glossary and Reference Library

World’s Largest Opinionated Agile Reference Library. The content is created and the links are curated through the lens of Agile Pain Relief Consulting’s view of what is effective in the practice of Scrum and Agile. We don’t accept submissions, and emails to that effect are marked as spam. Book listings may use affiliate links that could result in a small commission received by us if you purchase, but they do not affect the price at all. From experience, this won’t amount to anything more than a cup of coffee in a year.

We’re always looking for all things Agile. As a result, we’ve amassed a large collection of information covering lots of practical topics, techniques, tips, and case studies which we believe may help you toward your Scrum/Agile goals. They have been curated and organized into one spot, to share with you to help you on your Agile journey. We routinely scan for broken links, but if you spot one before we do, please let us know.

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  • 10 Minute Build is the idea that we should be able to build a system and run its test suites in 10 minutes or less. Fast build-and-test provides quicker(...)
  • Acceptance Criteria are used to ensure that a feature (or User Story) the team is building meets the needs of the End User. The common practice is for(...)
  • Agile is a mindset for doing work in a team environment that improves teamwork, professional performance, and adaptability. The Agile mindset is focused(...)
  • In software development work, a design pattern is a description of a solution to a recurring problem. It outlines the elements that are necessary to solve(...)
  • Agile Architect – An Oxymoron Agile Architects Reimagined? Not at the top of the pyramid, but perhaps aside Resource Links: Coaching the Agile(...)
  • Resource Links: Catalog of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture Event Sourcing Mistakes we made adopting event sourcing (and how we(...)
  • Agile Architecture emphasizes the minimum amount of design upfront, and focusing on building something and evolving the architecture as our understanding(...)
  • Git, Mercurial and other source control tools provide robust and easy to use branching capabilities. For work with OpenSource software —where anyone could(...)
  • Business Intelligence (aka BI) is the dark art of extracting knowledge from a database in a way that humans can understand it. Agile Business Intelligence(...)
  • Traditional fixed price, fixed outcome contracts don't fare well in an Agile world. The traditional approach puts the emphasis on getting the details(...)
  • Agile Documentation. Is it an oxymoron? The Agile Manifesto says "Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation". It doesn't say no documentation, and(...)
  • In my workshops, I often have people who are focused on the question: “How can I help my team go faster?”, or “How can we deliver this Product sooner?”(...)
  • Embedded Software Development is about building software that is installed inside a device example: thermostat, car engine controller, planes, WiFi(...)
  • Agile Game Development is different from classical software development. Building a game from scratch will require a broader group of people than we're(...)
  • Agile is about adapting to changing requirements and needs. Governments, just like anyone else, have to deal with dynamic issues as they arise and evolve,(...)
  • Agile approaches have taken over the world of software, because teams that deliver value sooner with higher quality beat the slow. Hardware teams face(...)
  • Agile or Lean UX (User eXperience) is about incorporating UX into the flow of work of a development team. Many try the approach of having the UX people(...)
  • Resource Links: Agile in a Mainframe and Cobol world Make Your Mainframe Systems and Technology More Agile: An Interview with Jay McFarling and(...)
  • It's strange to start becoming Agile and assume that Organizational Structure won't change. As Agile steers an organization to focus on Product and(...)
  • Traditional fixed price, fixed outcome contracts don't fare well in an Agile world. The traditional approach puts the emphasis on getting the details(...)
  • Sales and Marketing are challenged in the same way that software development was over 20 years ago. The work is often split over multiple groups, and(...)
  • Scrum in the world of work, allows teams to self-organize around a common goal (Delivering a Product). Scrum in education is about getting kids to self(...)
  • Agile's success is also its Achilles heel. Everyone wants to do Agile, but not everyone wants to make any changes to be Agile. There is a lot of focus on(...)
  • Resource Links: Approval Tests Approval Tests with Llewellyn Falco Approval Testing Using ApprovalTests in .Net 17 Wpf See Also: Legacy(...)
  • ARC motivation model is part of Self Determination Theory, which shows there are two kinds of motivation: Intrinsic and Extrinsic. Intrinsic(...)
  • Product Backlog Refinement (formerly known as "Product Backlog Grooming") is a session during which the Scrum Team (Developers, Product Owner,(...)
  • Behaviour Driven Development (or BDD) is an approach that gets team members to collaborate on describing the behaviours of the user story or product(...)
  • A bottleneck is a constraint that slows the delivery of value in our system. That is awfully abstract language, so let’s provide an example from everyday(...)
  • Resource Links: 0 Bugs Policy The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity Bug Prediction Tool from Google Bug(...)
  • Burndown charts graph work remaining vs time. They were originally used for tracking work in Sprints and across releases. Sprint Burndowns that track(...)
  • In traditional approaches, the Business Analyst gathers the requirements months or years ahead of the team. Clearly that doesn't work in an Agile world.(...)
  • Resource Links: Adobe Premiere Pro Scrum Adoption Agile Transformation @ Salesforce.com An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide (...)
  • A Causal Loop Diagram is a visual representation and reference that helps to understand cause and effect connections. It works best when people work(...)
  • Agile Coaching is an ill-defined concept. Self-described "Agile Coaches" appeared in the Agile world long before there was a definition. ScrumAlliance(...)
  • Traditional approaches put a lot of emphasis on Code Inspection or Reviews for finding defects. In human terms, that is like an editing process. The(...)
  • Traditional approaches put a lot of emphasis on Code Inspection or Reviews for finding defects. In human terms, that is like an editing process. The(...)
  • Pair Programming is when two people write code together on one machine. It helps improve code quality, readability, and simplicity. Not only is it an(...)
  • Collective Code Ownership is the premise that the whole team owns the code. Anyone on the team can add new features, fix a bug, write a test case, or(...)
  • Colocation is when team members are in the same physical location so in-person interaction and collaboration can take place. While the Scrum Guide does(...)
  • A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group that brings people with a common cause or purpose together on a regular basis. They can be formed around a role(...)
  • We encounter complexity whenever we're asked to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug. Or when we're asked how long it will take to bring a novel(...)
  • Continuous Delivery is the game of delivering features to Production whenever a change is made. It shortens the feedback, and even the payment cycle,(...)
  • Continuous Delivery is the game of delivering features to Production whenever a change is made. It shortens the feedback, and even the payment cycle,(...)
  • Continuous Delivery is the game of delivering features to Production whenever a change is made. It shortens the feedback, and even the payment cycle,(...)
  • In software development, Continuous Integration is the practice of merging all developers' working code to the main or head branch several times a day.(...)
  • Traditional fixed price, fixed outcome contracts don't fare well in an Agile world. The traditional approach puts the emphasis on getting the details(...)
  • A set of protocols that can aid teams in improving communications. They're modelled on a similar principle to Design patterns. Resource Links: (...)
  • Cross-skilling is where a team member decides (without being pushed) to learn a new skill area. This learning will, of course, take time and in the short(...)
  • A Cumulative Flow Diagram is a visual summary of the information contained on the Scrum Wall, Task Board, or Kanban Wall. A Cumulative Flow Diagram(...)
  • Cycle Time is the time it takes from the moment a team starts work on an item, until the moment value is delivered to the customer. It matters because the(...)
  • We encounter complexity whenever we're asked to estimate how long it will take to fix a bug. Or when we're asked how long it will take to bring a novel(...)
  • The Daily Scrum is the daily meeting where the Scrum Team get ready to collaborate for the day, and check if they’re still on track to complete their goal(...)
  • The Daily Scrum is the daily meeting where the Scrum Team get ready to collaborate for the day, and check if they’re still on track to complete their goal(...)
  • Agile's success is also its Achilles heel. Everyone wants to do Agile, but not everyone wants to make any changes to be Agile. There is a lot of focus on(...)
  • Agile's success is also its Achilles heel. Everyone wants to do Agile, but not everyone wants to make any changes to be Agile. There is a lot of focus on(...)
  • Agile Teams need to make small decisions frequently. Many teams experiment with majority rules and quickly discover that it's a way to ensure a few team(...)
  • Resource Links: 0 Bugs Policy The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity Bug Prediction Tool from Google Bug(...)
  • Definition of Done is the official checklist that Scrum Teams maintain of the qualities they intend their work to achieve. It helps the team assess(...)
  • Resource Links: A lesson in agile: How one team ended dependency delays Agile Organizations Must Address Both Structural and Instantiated(...)
  • If you thought that ScrumMaster was a poorly named role in Scrum, check out Developers. In recent years, the ScrumGuide has been making changes to help(...)
  • DevOps (also now DevSecOps) is the practice of Development working more closely with Operations. Over time, the Developers automate various aspects of(...)
  • Resource Links: 12 ways to improve cross-office collaboration Agile Alternatives for a Geographically Distributed Team Agile in Dispersed or(...)
  • Agile Documentation. Is it an oxymoron? The Agile Manifesto says "Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation". It doesn't say no documentation, and(...)
  • Dot voting is a mechanism to help an Agile team select a single item from many or prioritize among a number of options. It's a remarkably simple tool. We(...)
  • Agile Architecture emphasizes the minimum amount of design upfront, and focusing on building something and evolving the architecture as our understanding(...)
  • Empathy Maps are a tool to help us record what we understand about our audience. The maps prompt the team to answer questions about what the users do,(...)
  • In my workshops, I often have people who are focused on the question: “How can I help my team go faster?”, or “How can we deliver this Product sooner?”(...)
  • Ensemble Programming (formerly known as Mob Programming) is the logical extension of Pair Programming. The entire team work together to deliver a single(...)
  • An estimate is a qualified guess to help people make a decision about doing work. In the Agile world, one approach to estimation has become prevalent: the(...)
  • Agile Architecture emphasizes the minimum amount of design upfront, and focusing on building something and evolving the architecture as our understanding(...)
  • Resource Links: Extreme Programming What is Extreme Programming? EXTREME PROGRAMMING BOOKS Extreme Programming Installed – Ron Jeffries,(...)
  • Facilitation is the art of helping a group of people reach agreement or understanding, without direct involvement in the process itself. In the game of(...)
  • "Failure demand is demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer." - John Seddon 2009 All work a team does comes(...)
  • Agile's success is also its Achilles heel. Everyone wants to do Agile, but not everyone wants to make any changes to be Agile. There is a lot of focus on(...)
  • Giving and Taking Design Criticism – with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock Early Feedback Reduces Anger and Frustration Scrum Anti-Patterns: Micromanagement How(...)
  • Forecasting in the Agile world asks the difficult questions: How much of our product backlog will ready by a certain date? or By which date a specific(...)
  • Magic of Science and Teams – #GOAT13 Presentation How Escape Rooms Teach About Teams Resource Links: Healthy teams, unhealthy teams: in your(...)
  • Impact Mapping is a tool to help teams focus their work on the feature by identifying portfolio items or strategic changes that will have the greatest(...)
  • Resource Links: The Impact of Lean and Agile Quantified – Rally Research Study
  • "Anything that slows the team’s progress towards the Sprint Goal is an impediment." All too often I hear team members in Daily Scrum mention the same(...)
  • Agile teams attempt to use Retrospectives as a tool for Team Improvement. Yet our improvements often lead nowhere. Consider making your improvements into(...)
  • Team members get interrupted throughout their working day. Some of the interruptions are high value - e.g. a team member asking questions that helps the(...)
  • Iterative and Incremental Development is fancy language for working in cycles and always releasing a version of the product at the end of a cycle. In(...)
  • Kanban isn't just a board that you find in JIRA or Trello. It is a method to help improve the flow of work through a system. A kanban board is one way to(...)
  • Resource Links: First Steps in a Large-Scale Scrum Adoption at Agfa Healthcare: Case Study Descaling Organizations with LeSS Developing a High(...)
  • Resource Links: Applying Lean Tools and Techniques to Scrum Grown-Up Lean - The Nature of Software Little's Law - The ONE thing you can do to(...)
  • Lean Startup is a way for a group of people with a product idea to test it with the market and gain rapid feedback on whether the world wants what they're(...)
  • A core concept of Lean Startup is that we need to validate aspects of your product or business idea that are assumptions or that represent risk. Looking(...)
  • Agile or Lean UX (User eXperience) is about incorporating UX into the flow of work of a development team. Many try the approach of having the UX people(...)
  • Slack, in the context of Agile/Scrum, is when the time isn't solely focused on delivering. (It's important not to confuse this with Slack, a popular(...)
  • Legacy code is often described as code checked into the system without a unit test. A popular definition from Michael Feathers, author of Working(...)
  • Liberating Structures are tools that create balance in self-organization, which is at the heart of all Agile approaches. Too often self-organized events(...)
  • When a team has a product that is live in the field, they need a pattern to handle the support issues that come up, so that the critical defects get fixed(...)
  • Metrics are the tools we use (and misuse) to help us understand how we're evolving. Used well, Metrics can give us feedback on our team's experiments and(...)
  • MVP or Minimum Viable Product is often misunderstood, and confused with MCF - Minimum Crappy Feature. Where MCF is the minimum version of a product or(...)
  • Ensemble Programming (formerly known as Mob Programming) is the logical extension of Pair Programming. The entire team work together to deliver a single(...)
  • Team health checks have been popular in the Agile Community for years. Getting people to pay attention to the joy in their teams is a boon. The challenge(...)
  • Traditional approaches in the workplace assume that there is a strong linkage between motivation and financial reward. Theory is, if you pay people enough(...)
  • Buried in most job ads is the phrase "Looking for a great multitasker". Too bad they don't exist. Contrary to what some books would have you believe,(...)
  • MVP or Minimum Viable Product is often misunderstood, and confused with MCF - Minimum Crappy Feature. Where MCF is the minimum version of a product or(...)
  • Niko-Niko calendars are used to track mood, energy, happiness, etc, but not everyone thinks that they're a good idea. The good: a team that tracks how(...)
  • It's strange to start becoming Agile and assume that Organizational Structure won't change. As Agile steers an organization to focus on Product and(...)
  • Pair Programming is when two people write code together on one machine. It helps improve code quality, readability, and simplicity. Not only is it an(...)
  • People should be dedicated to one and only one team. The science of team work shows this over and over again. Yet, on occasion, we’re stuck when we have(...)
  • A Persona is a fictional character created to represent a group of users of a product. A persona is based in research of real users, usually discovered(...)
  • An estimate is a qualified guess to help people make a decision about doing work. In the Agile world, one approach to estimation has become prevalent: the(...)
  • Agile Portfolio Management is a tool for a group of teams that have too many major chunks of work in flight. Traditional Portfolio Management is centred(...)
  • Resource Links: 20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour An Introduction to Cost of Delay Business Value Game (or Poker) (...)
  • The Product Backlog is an ordered list of all the work items or value the Product Owner would like to see the Team work on in the foreseeable future.(...)
  • Product Backlog Refinement (formerly known as "Product Backlog Grooming") is a session during which the Scrum Team (Developers, Product Owner,(...)
  • Product Backlog Refinement (formerly known as "Product Backlog Grooming") is a session during which the Scrum Team (Developers, Product Owner,(...)
  • A core concept of Lean Startup is that we need to validate aspects of your product or business idea that are assumptions or that represent risk. Looking(...)
  • When a team has a product that is live in the field, they need a pattern to handle the support issues that come up, so that the critical defects get fixed(...)
  • "The Product Owner owns the product that the team is building." “The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from(...)
  • In traditional approaches, a Roadmap is a list of dates and promises that are being made to the customer. Traditional Roadmaps don’t work because there is(...)
  • The Product Vision is a shared understanding of the overall goal and purpose for creating a product. It provides purpose and direction for the team.(...)
  • Resource Links: Project Focus Is An Impediment to Long-Lived Teams Products Over Projects Product vs. Project Teams Project Work vs. Product(...)
  • Psychological safety is about being part of a team and knowing that you can share ideas and information without fear. Psychological safety isn't the(...)
  • In traditional approaches, the QA, Tester, or Quality Assurance tests the work of developers in a separate phase - sometimes months later. Clearly that(...)
  • Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behaviour. Refactoring is done to improve the simplicity and(...)
  • Resource Links: 12 ways to improve cross-office collaboration Agile Alternatives for a Geographically Distributed Team Agile in Dispersed or(...)
  • In many organizations, the people who do the work are treated like economic resources (think: iron ore) and it's felt that these resources have a price,(...)
  • The Sprint Retrospective is an event at the end of the Sprint where the Scrum Team reflects on all that happened in that period, with the intention to(...)
  • In traditional approaches, a Roadmap is a list of dates and promises that are being made to the customer. Traditional Roadmaps don’t work because there is(...)
  • A team safety check is a way of understanding the team’s readiness to be open and honest. It starts with a question like “Are you able to be open and(...)
  • Scaled Agile Framework, aka SAFe, is probably the least Agile approach to getting many teams to work together. At the heart of all of Agile approaches has(...)
  • When attempting to get many teams to work effectively together in an Agile world, we need some coordination model. This is typically referred to as(...)
  • The SCARF Model of human behaviour is useful to understand how people respond to the world through the lenses of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness,(...)
  • Scrum is an approach to applying the Agile mindset. Scrum is a way of organizing a team of people to deliver incremental parts or features of a product(...)
  • An Anti-Pattern is a recurring pattern that frequently shows up, where the behaviour creates new problems somewhere else in the system. Example: the(...)
  • The ScrumMaster is one of the more poorly-named aspects of Scrum. The intended meaning isn’t to imply a controller or giver of orders. Rather, a(...)
  • The Scrum Team is all of the people needed to get the product built and into the customer’s hands: ScrumMaster, who helps the team grow capacity to(...)
  • Scrum is a tool that organizes a team to deliver value to a customer. Along the way, the team is expected to improve the product and also the way they(...)
  • How do we build Secure products in Scrum? In a world where the development team deliver value every Sprint, it is hard to see how to ensure products are(...)
  • Resource Links: 10 Warning Signs, that your team is not self-organizing Creative Forces for Self Organizing Teams Monitoring ‘self-managing’(...)
  • Servant leadership is the act of leading through service to others. Okay, so how does that differ from traditional leadership? Traditional leadership(...)
  • Cross-skilling is where a team member decides (without being pushed) to learn a new skill area. This learning will, of course, take time and in the short(...)
  • Slack, in the context of Agile/Scrum, is when the time isn't solely focused on delivering. (It's important not to confuse this with Slack, a popular(...)
  • In my workshops, I often have people who are focused on the question: “How can I help my team go faster?”, or “How can we deliver this Product sooner?”(...)
  • Sometimes organizations form Special Teams assigned to tackle technical bugs or other challenges. Frequently, these special teams make the very problem(...)
  • Behaviour Driven Development (or BDD) is an approach that gets team members to collaborate on describing the behaviours of the user story or product(...)
  • A Sprint is a fixed period, ranging from one week to one month in length, during which the Scrum Team works to meet specific customer needs. As one Sprint(...)
  • The Sprint Backlog is a list of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) the Team has committed to for the next Sprint. It is the Scrum Team’s plan for how to achieve(...)
  • Burndown charts graph work remaining vs time. They were originally used for tracking work in Sprints and across releases. Sprint Burndowns that track(...)
  • Sprint Goal is a single product objective shared by the Scrum Team that describes the purpose of the Sprint and ensures that everyone moves in the same(...)
  • The ScrumGuide says that Sprints "are fixed length events of one month or less to create consistency" and "When a Sprint’s horizon is too long the Sprint(...)
  • Sprint Planning is an event at the beginning of a Sprint where the Team plans the items they can complete in the next Sprint. They also craft a Goal to(...)
  • The Sprint Retrospective is an event at the end of the Sprint where the Scrum Team reflects on all that happened in that period, with the intention to(...)
  • Sprint Review is an event at the end of the Sprint where the Scrum Team review the completed work with stakeholders. Stakeholders provide feedback on the(...)
  • When team membership changes every few months, teams (Scrum, Kanban, XP or otherwise) struggle to: create Psychological Safety, maintain Predictability,(...)
  • A Story Map is a way to help visualize the flow or story of a product. Across the top or horizontal axis of the map we place the major steps (often(...)
  • User Story Splitting is the art of splitting User Stories or Product Backlog Items (PBI) into smaller parts when an item is too big. My recommendation is(...)
  • In traditional approaches, a Roadmap is a list of dates and promises that are being made to the customer. Traditional Roadmaps don’t work because there is(...)
  • If Pair Programming is two people working together on a single problem at the same time (pre-Covid, Pairing meant sitting side by side with one computer),(...)
  • Systems Thinking takes the view that any problem we're working on is part of a larger, interconnected system. Instead of making a quick fix, Systems(...)
  • Test Driven Development [TDD] and Behaviour Driven Development [BDD] are often confused because the similarity of their names. TDD is the original(...)
  • Team Formation Models are helpful in understanding what state a team is at, and then using that information to make an educated guess as to what will help(...)
  • Slack, in the context of Agile/Scrum, is when the time isn't solely focused on delivering. (It's important not to confuse this with Slack, a popular(...)
  • The Scrum Guide offers very limited guidance, suggesting 3-9 people per team (exclusive of ScrumMaster and Product Owner), without giving reasons or(...)
  • Technical Debt is a deeply misunderstood term. It was originally coined at the beginning of Agile time by Ward Cunningham - from 1992: Shipping(...)
  • Test Driven Development (TDD) is the engineering practice where the developer writes their Unit Test case before they write their code. Like Unit Testing,(...)
  • The Theory of Constraints is a system improvement tool. It illustrates how in a system where we find a bottleneck, the bottleneck is the constraint that(...)
  • Git, Mercurial and other source control tools provide robust and easy to use branching capabilities. For work with OpenSource software —where anyone could(...)
  • Unit Testing is the process of writing small, code-level tests that prove that the method did what the developer intended when the test was written.(...)
  • A User Story is a tool used to provoke and summarize a conversation, between the Team and their Product Owner, for a better understanding of an item on(...)
  • User Story Splitting is the art of splitting User Stories or Product Backlog Items (PBI) into smaller parts when an item is too big. My recommendation is(...)
  • Agile or Lean UX (User eXperience) is about incorporating UX into the flow of work of a development team. Many try the approach of having the UX people(...)
  • The Product Vision is a shared understanding of the overall goal and purpose for creating a product. It provides purpose and direction for the team.(...)
  • Frequently in workshops, I get asked, “Where shouldn’t we use Scrum?” The short answer is there are lots of instances where the Scrum framework doesn’t(...)
  • A Working Agreement is a short set of guidelines created by the Team, for the Team, that establishes what the expectations of the Team are for one(...)
  • Work that hasn’t been deployed, shipped, or otherwise delivered to a customer has no real value. Value is only realized when the work is available for use(...)
  • Our modern work week of five days on and two days off is nothing more than an accident of history. Many organizations, and now even countries, are(...)
  • Agile's success is also its Achilles heel. Everyone wants to do Agile, but not everyone wants to make any changes to be Agile. There is a lot of focus on(...)
  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned the hard way that being on Zoom, or any other video conferencing system, wears us down. A few things we've(...)
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