[Agile & Scrum] Product Terms Flashcards
What is product backlog?
The product backlog is a prioritized list of features, enhancements, bug fixes, technical work, and other tasks that a team needs to complete to deliver a product. Managed by the Product Owner, it serves as a dynamic, ever-evolving to-do list that reflects the product’s goals, user needs, and business priorities. Items in the backlog are organized based on their value, urgency, and feasibility, allowing the team to focus on the highest-priority work in each sprint. As the team learns from user feedback, market changes, and project progress, new items may be added, and existing ones reprioritized. This flexible, strategic tool keeps the development team aligned with the product vision and helps ensure continuous delivery of value to users and stakeholders.
User Story
User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature or requirement from the perspective of the end user, written to convey what the user needs and why. Typically structured as “As a [type of user], I want [an action or feature] so that [benefit or value],” user stories help teams understand the purpose of a feature in terms of user needs and desired outcomes. They serve as building blocks in Agile development, guiding the creation of features that directly address user pain points or goals. User stories are intentionally brief, leaving room for detailed conversations between the Product Owner, development team, and stakeholders to clarify requirements and expectations, promoting collaboration and a shared understanding.
What makes a good user story.
A good user story should follow the INVEST criteria. It should be Independent, meaning it can be developed without heavyly relying on other stories; Negotiable, serving as a placeholder for discussion and refinement; and Valuable, delivering clear benefits to the user and business. It must also be Estimable, allowing the team to accurately gauge the effort required; Small, manageable within a single sprint; and Testable, with clear acceptance criteria to confirm when it’s complete. Additionally, a good user story is written from the user’s perspective, using a format like “As a [user], I want [action] so that [benefit],” ensuring it aligns with user needs and keeps the team focused on delivering meaningful value.
Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance Criteria are clear conditions that a user story or task must meet to be considered complete. They define what needs to happen for the feature to work as expected, ensuring alignment between the Product Owner, development team, and stakeholders, the Product Owner creates the acceptance criteria in collaboration with the team to ensure clarity and feasibility. These criteria help guide development, testing, and confirm when the feature is done. ( Best time to write them should be during grooming section) The most common format for acceptance criteria is a scenario-based format using:
Given: The initial context or setup.
When: The action taken by the user.
Then: The expected outcome.
Acceptance Criteria refers to a set of predefined requirements that must be met in order to mark a user story complete a product owner or a product manager is responsible for writing acceptance criteria for the stories in your product backlog or at least facilitating the discussion about it in collaboration with the team to ensure clarity and feasibility. the best time to write acceptance criteria would during backlog grooming sessions an acceptance criteria has various
User Story: as a online bookstore shopper i want to collect books in my shopping basket so that i can purchase multiple books at once.
The acceptance criteria for that user story could be
scenario 1: the same book can be added multiple times to the shopping basket
Given: my shopping basket contains one copy of Harry Porter 1
When i add the book harry porter 1 to my shopping basket
Then my shopping basket should contain two copies of harry porter 1 so that’s one scenario you can add
Sprint
A sprint is a timeboxed iteration in Agile development, typically lasting 1 to 4 weeks, during which a cross-functional team works on a set of prioritized tasks from the product backlog. The goal of a sprint is to deliver a usable and potentially shippable increment of the product by the end of the iteration.
Each sprint starts with a Sprint Planning meeting to define the sprint goal and decide which tasks or user stories will be completed. Throughout the sprint, the team meets daily in Daily Standups to discuss progress, challenges, and next steps. The sprint ends with a Sprint Review, where the team demonstrates the completed work to stakeholders, and a Sprint Retrospective, where the team reflects on what went well and what can be improved for future sprints.
Sprints provide a structured way to ensure continuous delivery of value, promote adaptability to changing priorities, and maintain a consistent pace for the team.
A sprint is a short, time-boxed period and iterative release cycles when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints make projects more manageable, allow teams to ship high quality work faster and more frequently and gives them more flexibility to adapt to change.A sprint typically last two to four weeks, although the duration can vary based on the team’s preferences and the nature of the project.
Time boxing in scrum is basically allotting a fixed unit of time for an activity incorporating a time-boxed approach brings in discipline predictability and creates a situation for inspect and adapt. every event in scrum is time boxed and cannot be extended unless absolutely necessary.
product roadmap
A product roadmap is a strategic document that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and timeline for a product’s development. It provides a high-level plan of what the product team aims to achieve and the steps needed to get there, aligning short-term tasks with long-term goals. A roadmap typically includes key milestones, upcoming features, and target release dates, offering a clear view of how the product will evolve to meet customer needs and business objectives. By sharing the roadmap with stakeholders, the team ensures everyone stays aligned on priorities and can track progress toward achieving the product’s mission.
Velocity
Velocity is a metric used in Agile and Scrum to measure the amount of work a team completes during a sprint. It is typically calculated based on the sum of story points, hours, or other effort units associated with the user stories or tasks finished during a sprint.
Velocity helps teams understand their capacity for future sprints, enabling more accurate sprint planning and forecasting. For example, if a team completes 30 story points in one sprint and maintains a similar pace over multiple sprints, their average velocity becomes a benchmark for estimating how much work they can handle in upcoming iterations.
It is important to note that velocity is a team-specific metric and should not be used to compare different teams. Instead, it is a tool for tracking progress and improving predictability within the same team over time.
Three Artifacts
scrum defines three artifacts the scrum artifacts are designed to maximize the transparency of key information so that everybody has the same understanding of the artifact there are three scrum artifacts
product backlog
firstly we have a product backlog the product backlog is an ordered list of everything that is known to be needed in the product it is created by the product owner with the help of the development team and in the scrum master
sprint backlog
the sprint backlog is the collection of product backlog items that
the team commits to achieve in a given sprint in simple terms it is a subset of the product backlog that the team intends to complete in a sprint
product increment product increment is the sum of all the product backlog items completed during a sprint and the value of the increments of all previous sprints basically it is a step towards a vision or a goal
Sprint Planning
what is discussed during the sprint planning meeting during sprint planning
the entire scrum team collaborates and discusses the work to be performed in the sprint the scrum master ensures that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose to be precise in this meeting
you and your team try to answer three questions which are
why is this sprint valuable
what can be delivered in this sprint
how to achieve that work
by the end of sprint planning you will
have the sprint goal the product backlog items selected for the sprint plus the plan for delivering them
these three things together are referred to as the sprint backlog