Scrum Glossary of Terms 

A 

Acceptance Criteria​: Details that indicate the scope of a user story and help 
the team and product owner determine done-ness.  

Agile​: the name coined for the wider set of ideas that Scrum falls within; the 
Agile values and principles are captured in the Agile Manifesto.  

Architect: ​there is no architect role on a Scrum team, instead all team 

members are responsible for emerging the architecture  

B
Burn-down Chart:​ a chart which shows the amount of work which is 
thought to remain in a backlog. Time is shown on the horizontal axis and 
work remaining on the vertical axis. As time progresses and items are 
drawn from the backlog and completed, a plot line showing work 
remaining may be expected to fall. The amount of work may be assessed 
in any of several ways such as user story points or task hours. Work 
remaining in Sprint Backlogs and Product Backlogs may be communicated 
by means of a burn-down chart. See also: Burnup Chart 

Burn-up Chart:​ a chart which shows the amount of work which has been 
completed. Time is shown on the horizontal axis and work completed on 
the vertical axis. As time progresses and items are drawn from the backlog 
and completed, a plot line showing the work done may be expected to 
rise. The amount of work may be assessed in any of several ways such as 
user story points or task hours. The amount of work considered to be 
in-scope may also be plotted as a line; the burn-up can be expected to 
approach this line as work is completed. 

C
Coherent/Coherence:​ The quality of the relationship between certain 
Product Backlog items which may make them worthy of consideration as a 
whole. See also: Sprint Goal. 
D
Daily Scrum:​ daily time-boxed event of 15 minutes for the Development 
Team to re-plan the next day of development work during a Sprint. 
Updates are reflected in the Sprint Backlog. 

Definition of Done:​ a shared understanding of expectations that the 

Increment must live up to in order to be releasable into production. 
Managed by the Development Team. 

Development Team:​ the role within a Scrum Team accountable for 

managing, organizing and doing all development work required to create a 
releasable Increment of product every Sprint. 

E
Emergence:​ the process of the coming into existence or prominence of 
new facts or new knowledge of a fact, or knowledge of a fact becoming 
visible unexpectedly. 

Empiricism:​ process control type in which only the past is accepted as 
certain and in which decisions are based on observation, experience and 
experimentation. Empiricism has three pillars: transparency, inspection and 
adaptation. 

Engineering standards:​ a shared set of development and technology 

standards that a Development Team applies to create releasable 
Increments of software. 

F
Forecast (of functionality):​ the selection of items from the Product 
Backlog a Development Team deems feasible for implementation in a 
Sprint. 

I
Increment:​ a piece of working software that adds to previously created 
Increments, where the sum of all Increments -as a whole - form a product. 
P
Product Backlog:​ an ordered list of the work to be done in order to create, 
maintain and sustain a product. Managed by the Product Owner. 

Product Backlog refinement:​ the activity in a Sprint through which the 

Product Owner and the Development Teams add granularity to the 
Product Backlog. 

Product Owner:​ the role in Scrum accountable for maximizing the value of 
a product, primarily by incrementally managing and expressing business 
and functional expectations for a product to the Development Team(s). 

R
Ready:​ a shared understanding by the Product Owner and the 
Development Team regarding the preferred level of description of Product 
Backlog items introduced at Sprint Planning. 

Refinement:​ see Product Backlog Refinement 

S
Scrum:​ a framework to support teams in complex product development. 
Scrum consists of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, 
artifacts, and rules, as defined in the Scrum GuideTM. 

Scrum Board:​ a physical board to visualize information for and by the 

Scrum Team, often used to manage Sprint Backlog. Scrum boards are an 
optional implementation within Scrum to make information visible. 

Scrum Guide™:​ the definition of Scrum, written and provided by Ken 

Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, co-creators of Scrum. This definition 
consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them 
together. 

Scrum Master:​ the role within a Scrum Team accountable for guiding, 
coaching, teaching and assisting a Scrum Team and its environments in a 
proper understanding and use of Scrum. 
Scrum Team:​ a self-organizing team consisting of a Product Owner, 
Development Team and Scrum Master. 

Scrum Values:​ a set of fundamental values and qualities underpinning the 

Scrum framework; commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage. 

Self-organization:​ the management principle that teams autonomously 

organize their work. Self-organization happens within boundaries and 
against given goals. Teams choose how best to accomplish their work, 
rather than being directed by others outside the team. 

Sprint:​ time-boxed event of one month or less, that serves as a container 

for the other Scrum events and activities. Sprints are done consecutively, 
without intermediate gaps. 

Sprint Backlog:​ an overview of the development work to realize a Sprint’s 

goal, typically a forecast of functionality and the work needed to deliver 
that functionality. Managed by the Development Team. 

Sprint Goal:​ a short expression of the purpose of a Sprint, often a business 

problem that is addressed. Functionality might be adjusted during the 
Sprint in order to achieve the Sprint Goal. 

Sprint Planning:​ time-boxed event of 8 hours, or less, to start a Sprint. It 

serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the work from the Product Backlog 
that’s most valuable to be done next and design that work into Sprint 
backlog. 

Sprint Retrospective:​ time-boxed event of 3 hours, or less, to end a Sprint. 

It serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the past Sprint and plan for 
improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint. 

Sprint Review:​ time-boxed event of 4 hours, or less, to conclude the 

development work of a Sprint. It serves for the Scrum Team and the 
stakeholders to inspect the Increment of product resulting from the Sprint, 
assess the impact of the work performed on overall progress and update 
the Product backlog in order to maximize the value of the next period. 
Stakeholder:​ a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest 
in and knowledge of a product that is required for incremental discovery. 
Represented by the Product Owner and actively engaged with the Scrum 
Team at Sprint Review. 

T
Technical Debt:​ the typically unpredictable overhead of maintaining the 
product, often caused by less than ideal design decisions, contributing to 
the total cost of ownership. May exist unintentionally in the Increment or 
introduced purposefully to realize value earlier. 

V
Values: ​When the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and 
respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the *Scrum pillars* of 
transparency, inspection, and adaptation *come to life* and *build trust* for 
everyone. The Scrum Team members learn and explore those values as 
they work with the Scrum events, roles and artifacts. ​Download​ the Scrum 
Values Poster 

Velocity:​ an optional, but often used, indication of the average amount of 
Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint by a 
Scrum Team, tracked by the Development Team for use within the Scrum 
Team.