Agile Frameworks & Core Values
The 2001 retreat in Snowbird, Utah, where 17 software developers met to create the Agile Manifesto, took place at this type of resort.
What is a ski resort?
In Azure DevOps Boards, this top-level work item type represents a significant strategic business initiative that spans multiple Features or Teams.
What is an Epic?
This popular three-part standard template for writing user stories starts with "As a [role], I want [feature] so that...
What is the User Story Template?
The maximum recommended time duration for a standard daily Scrum meeting.
What is 15 minutes?
The misconception that "Agile means no documentation" is debunked by the Agile Manifesto's emphasis on valuing this over comprehensive documentation.
What is working software?
According to the Agile Manifesto, we value working software over this time-consuming deliverable.
What is comprehensive documentation?
The visual view in Azure DevOps Boards that lets you drag work items through customizable columns representing different workflow states (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done).
What is a Kanban Board?
The "C" in Ron Jeffries' 3 Cs of user story writing stands for Card, Conversation, and this final element that defines when the story is complete.
What is Confirmation (or acceptance criteria)?
This metric represents the average amount of work (often in story points) a Scrum team completes during a single Sprint.
What is Velocity?
This co-creator of Scrum shares a last name with a famous English country house and wrote the book "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time."
Who is Jeff Sutherland?
This lean framework uses a visual board with explicit Work In Progress (WIP) limits to optimize continuous delivery instead of fixed timeboxes.
What is Kanban?
This native Azure Boards feature allows teams to view interactive, calendar-based timelines of work items spanning across multiple teams and sprints to track dependencies and delivery schedules.
What are Delivery Plans?
The acronym INVEST sets the quality guidelines for a well-formed user story. The "E" stands for this quality, meaning the team can gauge its size and effort.
What is Estimable (full acronym: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable)?
On a Burn Down Chart, this trend line shows the expected progress slope from total sprint scope down to zero remaining work.
What is the Ideal Line (or Guideline)?
The famous agile fable involving two animals opening a breakfast restaurant illustrates the difference between being "involved" and being "committed."
What is The Chicken and the Pig?
The three core pillars of Empiricism upon which the Scrum framework is built.
What are Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation?
In Azure DevOps, this built-in capability lets you create saved WIQL searches to track filtered work items based on specific criteria you provide.
What are Queries?
This short, timeboxed research activity is conducted to answer a technical question, explore a design, or gather enough information to estimate a complex user story.
What is a Spike?
While Lead Time measures total elapsed time from backlog entry to production release, this metric measures time from when work actually begins to completion.
What is Cycle Time?
Originating from Toyota's lean manufacturing, this Japanese term translates to "continuous improvement" and forms the philosophical basis of retrospectives.
This extreme programming (XP) practice pairs two developers at one workstation, with one driving the keyboard and the other reviewing in real time.
What is Pair Programming?
In Azure DevOps settings, you use these two organizational hierarchy levels beneath your Organization to define timeframes and team ownership structures.
What are Iteration Paths (Sprints) and Area Paths?
This agile estimation practice has team members place user stories along a wall or virtual scale from smallest to largest silently before assigning point values, making it much faster than individual Planning Poker rounds.
What is Affinity Estimating (or Silent Sizing/Bucket System)?
This estimation scale, frequently used in Planning Poker, helps teams account for relative effort and complexity uncertainty using a non-linear sequence.
What is the Modified Fibonacci Sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...)?
The engineering metric concept named after a 19th-century British economist that describes how improving resource efficiency often leads to higher demand and localized bottlenecking.
What is Jevons Paradox?