Shortlist: 10 terms you’ll need to know for agile project management

This mini glossary of agile terms is by no means exhaustive, but it covers much of the terminology used on an everyday basis.

1. Agile working. A means of working in an iterative way that allows for changing requirements throughout the project management lifecycle.

2. Backlog. Work that has been prioritised but still needs to be completed.

3. Cadence. The duration of a specific release cycle or sprint. It’s the rhythm of an Agile team’s development cycle and it helps keep the repetitive tasks going smoothly so that the developers are able to manage the variable parts of the solution development effectively.

4. Kanban framework. Scrum and lean ways of working are the most popular agile methods, but you can also use Kanban if you need total flexibility – for example, you need to add ‘stories’ (or tasks) on the go, in the middle of sprints. Kanban is also useful if you want to deliver your project at any time, you need an easily understandable working system, or your team isn’t comfortable with big changes to their style of working.

5. Lean working. A method of working that places a focus on ‘eliminating waste’, or steering clear of any requirement or enhancement that does not add any real value to the project’s goal.

6. Mad Sad Glad. An Agile method that promotes an Agile team’s health and well-being by creating and encouraging a positive work environment. This retrospective process allows team members to think about how they feel, understand their concerns or questions, and foster better emotional health.

7. Planning Poker. During a planning session, team members may be assigned Fibonacci cards. The scrum master will call out tasks and requirements, and team members will lay down a card corresponding to their personal perception of a task’s priority/difficulty.

This gamified approach to prioritisation is known as planning poker. It can lead to tasks being prioritised for a sprint in a way that enables the producers to have an informed say on what they can and should deliver to help a project progress smoothly.

8. Scrum. An agile methodology whereby the team has a planning meeting at the start of a sprint. Following the planning meeting, the team will hold a daily scrum. This is a short daily meeting held each morning (lasting no longer than 15 minutes, often held standing up so that everyone remains at peak focus).

Scrum meetings are attended by the project manager and ScrumMaster. Team members share what they worked on the day before, what they’ll work on today, and any impediments to their success.

Scrum methodology is often accompanied by a product backlog which lists out all the requirements that remain to be added to the project. Items in the product backlog can be given priorities and updated so that the team always knows what it most needs to work on.

9. Sprint. agile work periods are divided into sprints. These are short periods of delivery by which the team aims to complete the tasks they have set themselves for that sprint. A sprint might, for example, last for a working week. A long project will be comprised of many sprints. Each sprint is preceded by a planning meeting and features daily scrum meetings.

10. Stories. Requirements are written as ‘stories’ that are amassed in a prioritised list called the backlog.