Scrum & Agile Vocabulary

Sprint Retrospective: a Scrum ceremony held after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint Planning. Purpose: the team inspects itself — processes, tools, interactions, practices — and creates an actionable improvement plan. Standard question framework: "What went well? What didn't go well? What will we improve?" Retrospective format vocabulary: Start / Stop / Continue — what to add, remove, or keep. 4Ls — Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For. Mad / Sad / Glad — emotional retrospective. Sailboat / Speedboat — wind (helps), anchors (blocks), rocks (risks). Dot voting — each person places a limited number of dots on items they find most important. Action items — specific, owned improvements the team commits to. Timebox — retrospective is timeboxed to 3 hours for a 1-month Sprint (shorter for shorter Sprints). Scrum Guide principle: "The Scrum Team inspects how the last Sprint went with regards to individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done." In conversation: "Our retros were too polite — we switched to anonymous sticky notes and the real issues started surfacing."

Velocity: the sum of story points of all completed (Done) user stories in a sprint. Used as a forecasting tool — "if our velocity is 40 points, we shouldn't plan more than ~40 points next sprint." Estimation and planning vocabulary: Story points — a relative measure of effort, complexity, and uncertainty. Not tied to hours. Planning Poker — estimation technique using modified Fibonacci cards (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100); team votes simultaneously to avoid anchoring. T-shirt sizing — XS, S, M, L, XL estimates; quick relative sizing for a backlog. Relative estimation — estimating one story relative to another ("this is twice as complex as that one"). Capacity — total available person-hours in a sprint (accounting for meetings, leave, etc.); different from velocity. Sprint burndown chart — chart showing remaining story points day-by-day during a sprint; ideal line vs actual. Release burnup chart — shows progress toward a release goal over multiple sprints. Common mistake: treating story points as hours leads to micro-management. In conversation: "After three sprints we had stable velocity at 38 points — we stopped saying yes to last-minute additions that would push us to 55."

Definition of Done (DoD): a formal list of criteria that every product increment must satisfy to be considered "Done." It creates a shared standard across the team and ensures quality consistency. DoD vs Acceptance Criteria distinction (crucial!): Definition of Done — applies to ALL stories; team-level quality standard (e.g., "code reviewed, tests passing, docs updated"). Acceptance Criteria — specific to ONE story; written by the Product Owner; describes the feature's expected behaviour ("given X, when Y, then Z"). Other definitions vocabulary: Definition of Ready (DoR) — criteria that must be met before a story enters a sprint: estimated, acceptance criteria written, dependencies identified, feasible within one sprint. INVEST criteria for user stories: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable. Done Increment — the Scrum term for the potentially shippable product increment at the end of a sprint. Common Scrum mistake: having separate DoDs per team in a scaled environment; the Scrum Guide recommends a single DoD at the product level. In conversation: "We added 'security scan passing' to our DoD after an incident — now it's baked in, not an optional afterthought."

Servant-leader: a leadership philosophy central to the Scrum Master role. The SM leads by serving — removing obstacles, coaching, facilitating, and enabling the team to self-organise rather than directing their work. Scrum Master responsibilities vocabulary: Impediment removal — identifying and eliminating blockers (technical, organisational, procedural) that slow the team. Shield the team — protecting the sprint from scope changes, interruptions, and external requests mid-sprint. Facilitation — guiding ceremonies (Daily Scrum, Planning, Review, Retro) without dominating them. Coaching — teaching Agile/Scrum principles over time; SM pushes team toward self-management. Supporting the PO — helping with backlog refinement, helping clarify which techniques are effective. Self-organising team — the team decides how best to accomplish the sprint goal without being told how. Scrum values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage. Scaled Scrum roles: RTE (Release Train Engineer) — SM equivalent in SAFe; Chapter Lead — in Spotify model. In conversation: "The team became much more self-sufficient once I stopped answering 'who does what' — I just asked 'who can take this?'."

Backlog Refinement (formerly "Backlog Grooming"): an ongoing process where the team collaborates with the PO to review and improve backlog items — adding detail, removing obsolete items, splitting epics into stories, and estimating. It ensures the top items are Ready for sprint planning. Backlog vocabulary: Epic — a large user story that must be split into smaller stories before sprint work. User Story — a feature described from the end user's perspective: "As a [user], I want [action] so that [benefit]." Task — a sub-unit of work within a user story (e.g., "Write unit tests", "Update API docs"). Backlog grooming — older term for backlog refinement; still widely used in practice. Priority — the PO controls priority; highest priority items should be most detailed. DEEP backlog — Detailed appropriately, Estimated, Emergent (can change), Prioritised. spike — a time-boxed research/investigation task to reduce uncertainty about a story or technical approach. Icebox — items deprioritised indefinitely; often archived. Recommended time: Scrum Guide suggests no more than 10% of team capacity on refinement. In conversation: "We started doing 30-minute refinement sessions twice a week — sprint planning went from 4 hours to 90 minutes."