Some AGILE terms you should know about
Tags: Scrum, Software Development, Team, Agile Methodology, Agile

I was first introduced to the term Agile when I joined Simplified Automation Inc. 4 years ago. At first, I was completely overwhelmed by the concept and the terms used with it. Like me, there must be many who are either starting their career or are new to the concept of Agile. So let us discuss some of the common terms in Agile methodology.

What is AGILE?

The term Agile is derived from the word agility which means “Ability to move quickly and easily”. Agile methodology is a process of managing a project (generally used in software development) where teams collaborate to deliver the product with incremental and frequent delivery of smaller functionalities.

Agile came as an improvement to the traditional Waterfall Model in which we used to have larger deliverables with a bigger delivery timeline due to which it used to get difficult to cope up with ever-changing customer requirements.

Now let us look at some of the most common terms used when you work in an agile environment.

Backlog

In SCRUM framework, the backlog is a list of deliverables (can be new features, improvements, bugs, etc.) that we have to work on as a part of product development. In backlog, we generally decide the priority, refine the requirement or estimate the time we would require to complete that task.

Continuous Deployment (CD)

It is a practice of automating the process of updating & deploying the application on the production environment once it has been tested and passed the release criteria. This eliminates the dependency to manually deploy the application to production.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Just like CD, this is the process of automating the building and merging of code from different contributors into a single repository. This can be done n number of times in a day and developers can see their changes being reflected on the development environment.

Daily Scrum Meeting a.k.a Stand up

FYI: Stand up doesn’t mean that you can only give updates while standing up 😛

As the name suggests a daily scrum meeting is a meeting that happens daily generally at the start of the day among all the members of an agile team. In this meeting, the members can discuss any blockers they are facing and give updates on what they will be working on today.

Epic

An Epic is a collection of User Stories (discussed below).

Kanban Board

A preview of Kanban board on JIRA

A Kanban board is a workflow tool that consists of multiple columns like To-do, In-progress, QA, and Done. It helps us to visualize what task is at what stage and how our Sprint is performing.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is a concept of pairing up with a team member to work on a single task while sharing a single computer. I have personally enjoyed pairing with my peers as it helps me to learn a lot from them and it also helps us to solve a bigger problem easily and quickly.

Retrospective

It is a meeting where the team meets and discusses possible improvements about the process or execution of the last sprint.

Sprint

A sprint is the heart of Agile. A sprint is the actual time period where the team completes a set amount of work. Generally, the duration of the sprint ranges from a couple of weeks to a maximum of 4 weeks.

Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is a meeting that occurs before the start of a sprint where the team determines the tasks they want to work on in the upcoming sprint from the product backlog.

Story Points

It’s a unit in which the team estimates how much time it would require to complete the task (including testing). Generally, one story point can range from 2–4 man-hours. For example, a task that requires a day of work can be of 4 story points if one story point is equal to 2 hours.

User Stories

It is the informal description of a feature in the software from the perspective of an end-user.

Velocity

Velocity is the number of story points completed in a sprint.

War room

A war room is a meeting space where teams and stakeholders can communicate about project activities.

So here I tried to tell you about some of the common terms we use while working in an Agile environment. Any other terms you know? Lemme know in the comments below. Till then, keep collaborating and growing 📈.