🔄 Agile & Scrum English

Core Agile/Scrum vocabulary: sprint (time-boxed iteration), backlog (prioritised work queue), velocity (story points completed per sprint), retrospective (team reflection ceremony), standup (daily sync meeting), epic (large user story), story points (relative effort estimate), acceptance criteria, definition of done (DoD), definition of ready (DoR), sprint burndown, and product increment.

A user story is a small, sprint-sized feature described from a user's perspective: "As a developer, I want to filter logs by severity, so that I can identify errors quickly." An epic is a large body of work containing multiple user stories: "Logging & Observability" might contain 10-15 user stories. Epics are planned across multiple sprints; stories are completed within one.

User story format: "As a [role], I want [capability], so that [benefit]." Strong stories follow INVEST: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable. Good example: "As an admin user, I want to export audit logs as CSV, so that I can share compliance reports with the security team." Bad example: "As a user, I want the system to be better."

Velocity is the average number of story points a team completes per sprint. Discuss it as: "Our average velocity over the last 6 sprints is 38 points", "Velocity dropped this sprint due to an unplanned incident", "We're forecasting 40 points next sprint based on current velocity." Velocity is a planning tool, not a performance metric — comparing velocity across teams is meaningless.

Scrum ceremonies: Sprint Planning — "We're pulling in 42 points from the backlog", "This story needs to be broken down further." Daily Standup — "I completed X yesterday, I'm working on Y today, I'm blocked by Z." Sprint Review — "Let me walk you through the features we shipped this sprint." Retrospective — "What went well? What didn't? What do we try differently next sprint?"

The Definition of Done (DoD) is a shared checklist that a task must meet before being marked complete: code reviewed, tests passing, documentation updated, deployed to staging, acceptance criteria met. In meetings: "Is this story DoD? Have we updated the API docs?" The DoD prevents "done-done" confusion — something is either done (meets DoD) or not done.

A retrospective is a team reflection at the end of a sprint. Common formats: Start/Stop/Continue ("What should we start doing? Stop doing? Keep doing?"), 4Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For), Mad/Sad/Glad. Participation vocabulary: "I'd like to raise a point about our deployment process", "I think we should experiment with...", "What I appreciated about this sprint was..."

Backlog refinement (or grooming) is a regular session where the team reviews upcoming user stories: clarifying requirements, estimating effort (story points), splitting large stories, and ensuring stories meet the Definition of Ready. Phrases: "This story needs more acceptance criteria before we can estimate it", "Let's split this epic into smaller stories", "I'd estimate this at 5 points — it's similar to last sprint's auth work."

Agile is a set of values and principles (from the Agile Manifesto) for iterative, customer-focused software development. Scrum is a specific framework implementing Agile: it defines specific roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), ceremonies (sprints, standups, retrospectives), and artefacts (product backlog, sprint backlog, increment). Kanban is another Agile framework. Most "we do Agile" teams actually practice Scrum.

Story point discussion: "I'd estimate this at 3 points — it's straightforward with no unknowns", "I think this is closer to 8 — we'll need to refactor the service layer", "Can we split this story? It feels like a 13 and I don't like anything over 8", "I'm using 5 as my baseline for a typical API endpoint". Use Fibonacci scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) and remember: points measure relative complexity, not hours.