Below is a list of all the terms, arranged in alphabetical order, for you to browse and find out more.
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | #
A
The Abilene Paradox: when a group agrees to do something that no-one in the group actually supports because they don’t want to cause a fuss.
Acceptance Criteria: a checklist for a piece of work; a list of things that need to be completed for a piece of work to be considered finished.
Affinity Mapping: a facilitation technique when you have lots of things written on different sticky notes and you get people to group them together in categories. It helps organise the notes but also helps the group process the information as well.
Agile: a mindset of collaboratively delivering value to users in small pieces, one after the other, in a way that’s adaptable to change and always improving.
The Agile Manifesto: a set of four values and 12 principles that guide how to think and work in an Agile way.
The Anchoring Effect: the common human habit of relying on the first piece of information we encounter when making subsequent decisions.
The Asch Effect: when individuals in a group conform with what the group is doing even when the group is demonstrably wrong.
Ashby’s Law: if a system is to be stable, its internal flexibility / complexity needs to match or exceed the variety of complex situations it will encounter.
B
Backlog: see Product Backlog.
Backlog Refining: see Refining.
Big Room Planning: this is a larger planning session, often bringing together more than one team, often with a planning timeline of three months or more.
Blocker: something that’s stopping a piece of work from being completed.
Brook’s Law: adding more people to help deliver a software project that’s running out of time will only delay its completion.
Burndown: a measure of story points that have been completed over time, usually during the Sprint.
The Bystander Effect: an individual is less likely to offer help if other people are present.
C
Cadence: the repeatable events in a team’s calendar; the regular rhythm of meetings that a team takes part in, often during Sprints.
Campbell’s Law: the more a quantitative social indicator is used for decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption, influence, manipulation etc.
Campbell’s Law of Systemic Decay: systems naturally tend to degrade into bureaucratic self-preservation unless they are continually injued with localised, purposeful energy.
Capacity: the ‘amount’ of ability a team has to complete work in a given period of time; often assessed during Sprint Planning to work out what the team can commit to in the Sprint Backlog.
Charter: a written agreement on how a group will work with one another.
The Chatham House Rule: a facilitation technique to help run discussions on sensitive subjects; anyone is free to relay the information the gather during the event but they are not allowed to say who they learnt it from.
The Cobra Effect: an incentive that has unintended negative results that exacerbate the problem it was meant to solve.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): a structured, evidence-based psychological treatment that helps individuals identify and change negative thought patterns and behaviours.
Confirmation Bias: the tendency to search for an interpretation or recall information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs.
Continuous Improvement: a mindset of always looking to get better at things.
Conway’s Law: a group of people will design a system, product etc that mirrors their own communication structure.
Crazy 8s: a rapid, intense but often fun way to ideate using an A4 sheet of paper folded into 8 squares. You have a minute to fill each square, often with designs, ideas or other images.
Cunningham’s Law: if you want to get the right answer on the internet faster than posting a question, post the wrong answer and someone will correct you.
Cycle Time: the amount of time it takes for a piece of work to go from ‘in progress’ to ‘done’.
Cynefin: from the Welsh word for ‘habitat’ or ‘place of belonging’ this was designed as a sense-making framework to help identify if a situation is clear, complex, complicated, chaotic or disordered.
D
Daily Scrum: a 15 minute meeting held at the same time every working day of a Sprint, for the team to look at their progress towards the Sprint Goal and plan how they’re going to get closer over the course of the next 24 hours. Sometimes referred to as a Daily Standup.
Definition of Done: a formal description of how pieces of work need to be for them to be potentially releasable.
Definition of Ready: a formal description of what a product backlog item needs before it can be added to the Sprint Backlog by the team.
DevOps: a portmanteau of Development and Operations; a way of organising delivery work where the Developers and IT Operations teams are brought together as one; it’s more of a cultural and mindset, but it involves lots of helpful tools and techniques to help speed up the delivery of good quality and well-run digital products.
Dissociation: a defence mechanism against stress whereby a person feels disconnected from thie thoughts, feelings, memories, identities and/or surroundings
Dunbar’s Number: humans have a cognitive limit of forming meaningful social relations with about 150 people.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: people with limited knowledge or experience in a field will overestimate their own skills or knowledge in that domain.
E
Epic: a collection of user stories; usually represents a large piece of work or a strategic goal that is or can be broken down into smaller chunks.
Estimation: an Agile approach to collaboratively trying to forecast the relative effort, complexity and risk involved in delivering a piece of work.
Exposure Therapy: a psycholgical treatment designed to help individuals safetly contront their trauma-related memories, feared items or triggering situations in a controlled environment.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): a structured therapy treatment that uses bilateral stimulation (such as side-to-side eye movements) that helps the brain reprocess traumatic memories.
F
Fibonacci Sequence: a series of numbers where each one is the sum of the previous two (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc); often used for the relative sizing of Agile estimation to quickly categorise pieces of work by their likely effort, complexity and risk without getting caught up too much in the finer details.
Fight, flight, freeze or fawn: the four primary physiological and behavioural defence mechanisms that can be triggered when the nervous system perceives a threat.
G
Gall’s Law: a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. Complex systems designed from scratch rarely work.
The Good Regulator Theorem: a cybernetics concept whereby the regulator or controller of a system must match or mirror the system it controls. In order to manage something, a group must implicitly understand the thing by being like the thing.
Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Graham’s Law: bad habits, lazy metrics and poor communications will routinely drive out good working order unless actively resisted by the system.
Grounding Techniques: sensory-based exercises used to help someone come back from a trauma response or panic attack and become re-anchored in being physically and mentally present.
H
Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hofstadter’s Law: a task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take the law into account.
Hyrum’s Law: with a sufficient number of users of an API, every observable behaviour of the system will eventually be depended upon by someone.
Hyperbolic Discounting Principle: the human tendency to prefer smaller, immediate reward over larger, later rewards, creating a systemic bias against long-term planning.
Hypervigilance: an enhanced (and exhausting) state of sensory sensitivity and high alertness to potential threats around you.
I
Impediment: an obstacle, systemic delay or some form of friction which slows down a team from delivery. See also Blocker.
Increment: this is the total completed, releasable backlog items completed within a Sprint, which get added to all the previously completed increments that form part of the product.
Information Radiator: this is a visible display that clearly shares real-time progress, status and other information so people don’t need to ask; the opposite is an information refrigerator!
INVEST Criteria: a mnemonic that sounds for Independent, Negotiatble, Valuable, Estimatable, Small and Testable; this is the ideal state for User Stories.
Iteration: this is a fixed-length, recurring period of time (such as a Sprint) during which a team builds and delivers usable work.
J
Jidoka: a Lean Manufacturing concept known as ‘autonomation’ whereby a process or system is designed to stop when a defect or anomaly is occurred to stop further errors occur further down the line.
K
Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule: people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at the peak of the experience and the end of the experience, rather than the total average of every moment within the experience.
Kaizen: a Japanese philosophy of constantly making small, incremental improvements. See also Continuous Improvement.
Kanban: an Agile framework that visualises the flow of work and uses data to showcase potential improvements in the flow so teams can seek to constantly improve how they deliver.
The Kingman Formula: the average waiting time in a queue increases exponentially as resource utilisation approaches 100%.
L
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS): an organisational way to scale the Scrum framework into multi-teams that focusses on keeping things simple.
The Law of Diminishing Returns: a point in a production system where the allocation of an additional resource results in successively smaller increases in output.
The Law of Leaky Abstractions: all non-trivial distractions, to some degree, leak details of the underying situation they are trying to hide.
Lean: a people-foccussed delivery philosophy that prioritises maximising value, optimising the flow of work and tackling inefficiencies.
Linus’s Law: given a large enough number of eyeballs, all software bugs are shallow. The more people looking at code (or a document) the smaller or more manageable the errors.
Little’s Law: the long-term average number of items in a stationery queueing system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate multiplies by the average processing time.
The Ninety-Ninety Rule (lol): the first 90% of code accounts for the first 90% of development, while the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of time.
M
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): the smallest, simplest version of a product that can be released to test whether or not it will be successful.
Mobbing: when a group of people (such as a whole team of software developers) sits together to work on the same problem, in the same codebase or document, at the same time, to utilise their collective eyes and experience.
N
Neuroplasticity: the ability of the brain to structurally reorganise itself, form new neural connections and heal through someone’s lifetime.
O
Occam’s Razor: when presented with competing hypotheses, choose the one that makes the fewest number of new assumptions.
OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act): a military decision-making model that helps teams adapt to complex or fast-shifting environments.
P
Pair Programming: a technical practice where two developers work collaboratively on a single computer, with one writing the code and the other navigating and reviewing the code; can also work with writing.
Pareto’s Principle (the 80/20 rule): for many outcomes, roughly 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes/action/effort.
Parkinson’s Law: work expands so as to fulfil the time available for it’s completion. Probably also applies to meetings.
The Peter Principle: members of a hierarchical organisation are routinely promoted until they reach their absolute level of incompetence.
The Planning Falacy: a systematic tendency for individuals and organisations to display an optimism bias when planning things, underestimating the time, costs and risks of future actions.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): a psychiatric condition that can develop in individuals who have expereinced or witnessed a traumatic event, severe threat or cumulative horror.
Post-Traumatic Growth: the positive psychological transformation and structural personal strength that someone can develop as a result of navigating major life crises or trauma.
Product Backlog: an evolving list of everything that might be needed to make a product more valuable; in a Scrum team it belongs to the Product Owner and should be detailed appropriately, emergent over time, estimatable and ordered by priority.
Product Owner: a Scrum role; responsible for maximising the value of the product and managing the priority and clarity of the Product Backlog.
Psychological Safety: a shared belief in a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as speaking up about something, pointing out mistakes or asking questions without fear of being punished, humilated or otherwise made to feel uncomfortable.
Q
Quality Assurance: a systematic, proactive practise focussed on preventing defects and optimising the delivery process to ensure that the final product, service or system consistently meets the required organisational standards and user expectations.
R
The Red Queen Effect: based on a part of Alice in Wonderland, this relates that a system must continuously adapt, evolve and proliferate merely to maintain its relative fitness against an evolving environment.
Refining: a recurring team activity where upcoming items in the product backlog are discussed, detailed and prioritised so the team are ready to deliver them in the near future.
Retrospective: a regular meeting, usually held at the end of a Sprint, where the team reflects on how things are working and collaborate on ways to improve.
The Ringelmann Effect: the tendency for individual memebers of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of the group expands.
S
Sayre’s Law: in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): a controversial but widely used Agile framework that involves structured coordination of delivery across large organisations using tired governance and processes.
Scrum: one of the best known Agile frameworks; a lightwight iterative approach for people, teams and organisations to generate value by using adaptive solutions for complex problems.
Scrum of Scrums: a lightweight Agile scaling approach where representatives from different Scrum teams meet regularly to coordinate dependencies and share cross-team progress.
Scrum Master: a servant-leader dedicated to establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide, and helping the team improve their effectiveness.
Spike: a brief, timeboxed research or investigation task to reduce uncertainty before committing to developing a piece of work; it could resemble a study, experiment, prototype or other type of learning activity aimed at providing answers that can improve planning and delivery.
Sprint Backlog: a combination of the Sprint Goal, the product backlog items that a team selects for achieving this goal, and the plan to deliver it all.
Sprint Goal: a single, high-level objective for the Sprint to give the team focus, alignment and flexibility on how to achieve it.
Sprint Planning: a collaborative event at the start of a Sprint where the team agrees the Sprint Goal, selects the work they can realistically deliver by the end of the Sprint, and work out the plan to get it done.
Sprint Review: an event at the end of the Sprint to showcase the completed increment to stakeholders, gather feedback and collaborate on what to do next.
Story Points: an arbitrary unit of relative comparison for items of work denoting their size, complexity and risk; teams can then measure how many of these points they can complete in a repeatable period of time to help them forecast more accurately how much work they can get through in the future. For various reasons of human psychology, this way is significantly more accurate than simply asking people to guess when they think they will likely complete a task. See Estimation and Hofstadter’s law for further guidance.
Student Syndrome: people will typically only start to fully apply themselves to a task at the last possible moment before a deadline.
The Sunk-Cost Fallacy: this is when a person or organisation justifies increased investment in a decision based on prior cumulative investments, regardless of the benefits of further investment.
Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. Alternatively, in any given field, the majority of the work is mediocre, but a small proportion might be exceptional.
T
Technical Debt: if a team chooses a quick fix now, but will have to do more rework later, the total sum of all the rework yet to be done is referred to as the team’s technical debt; it’s not necessarily a bad thing if it helps a team deliver more value sooner, but it should be measured and managed to stop it from getting out of control.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: a bias where differences in data are ignored or similarities are overemphasised, leading to incorrect statistical conclusions. We evolved to spot patterns, but our brains can sometimes try to identify patterns even when the data suggests they do not exist.
Timebox: this is when you have a maximum amount of time allocared to an activity or completing something. You can complete the work, activity or meeting before the timebox but you can’t go over the time box. If you have a meeting timeboxed to one hour, you can complete the meeting in five minutes, but you cannot complete it in 61 minutes. If you mark them in a calendar they look like a box, hence the name. A Scrum Sprint is a commonly known example.
Trigger: an external stimulus such as a sound, smell, date, visual cue or otherwise, that unconsciously prompts the brain to re-experience a past traumatic memory as a current threat.
Trigger Warning: a brief statement preceding content that warns readers/viewers that the content will have references to potentially triggering themes or subjects like violence, trauma, distress etc, so that individuals can mentally prepare, manage their nervous system or simply opt out of the content.
U
User Story: a simple, informal, but easy-to-understand sentence structure that describes how a piece of work, software or otherwise should act from the perspective of the person using it; you don’t need to be technical to understand it and it helps support conversations surrounding the work by making things achingly clear to all. See also the INVEST criteria.
V
Velocity: a metric that shows the amount of work (usually expressed in story points) that a team can complete in a period of time (usually a Sprint); it’s common to take the average number of story points completed over the previous five Sprints to work out a reliable figure.
W
Wirth’s Law: software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limit: a Kanban principle whereby team agrees to limit the number of items they will work on at any given time because this increases focus and enhances the overall flow of work; the opposite of multitasking.
X
XP (eXtreme Programming): an Agile software development framework that values technical discipline, frequent releases and very close-knit collaboration with the customer.
Y
YAGNI (You Aint Gonna Need It): a principle stating that developers and product owners should never add functionality or process complexity until it is seen as strictly necessary; see eXtreme Programming.
Z
Zawinski’s Law: every programme will attempt to expand until it can eventually read emails, and those which can’t will eventually be replaced by those which can. Feature-creep is real!
#
3 Amigos: a backlog refining meeting between the Product Owner (or their proxy), the person building something valuable and the person who will test what they’re building, so they can refine the requirements together.
The 3 Cs: Card-Conversation-Confirmation; this is the process of producing a healthy User Story. You start by writing down the story (originally on a piece of card), have the crucial discussion with key people (the conversation), then agree on the acceptance criteria (the confirmation) that need to be fulfilled for the user story to be marked as ‘done’.