SU23 Key Terms

Here you will find a list of key terms that will be used to help you understand the agile framework, Scrum.

Agile: Framework that allows development plans to change over time as the product is developed as opposed to rigidly following a single unalterable plan from start to finish. Below is a picture of an agile framework.

Scrum: A type of agile framework that is frequently used by software development teams.

Scrum Master: This is the member of the team who is tasked with assigning and prioritizing work. In many cases (especially at SDSC) are known as project manager - but can be assigned to anyone on a team. They are responsible for making sure the team is as productive as possible, guiding the team through the project and/or daily operations work.

Product Owner: Responsible for decisions regarding the product - including decisions to change the plan and providing the necessary user story and conditions of satisfaction changes and then works with the team to outline and even provide details on new tasks and task efforts.

When choosing the product owner, the product owner should be:

Able to envision the product.
Highly available to answer questions from developers and guide the development of the product.
Able to create new user stories and tasks as the product evolves over time.

Scrum Team Member: Also known as the development team, the scrum team member is a professional who does the work of delivering a potentially releasable increment of “Done” product at the end of each sprint.

User Story: An informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are typically written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system.

Conditions of Satisfaction: The conditions under which a product owner would be satisfied that a product backlog item is done. Specific to a given product backlog item and define what must be true for that product backlog item to be considered done.

Task: Used to break down user stories. Tasks are the smallest unit used in scrum to track work and should be completed by one person on the team. Each user story has multiple tasks.

Sprint: Consists of sprint planning, daily scrums, development work, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Our sprints will be in 2 week increments during which teams will be working and developing to meet their sprint goals.

Sprint Planning: At the start of each sprint, the product owner presents the top items on the product backlog to the team.

Daily Scrum: Mandatory daily meeting during sprints that set the context for each day’s work and helps the team stay on track.

Sprint Review: At the end of each sprint, the team shows what they accomplished during the sprint in an informal way, shouldn’t feel like a task or distraction.

Sprint Retrospective: At the end of each sprint, the team (including the scrum master and product owner) reflect on how well Scrum is working for them and what changes they may wish to make for it to work even better.