Course 5 Glossary - Agile Project Management

Google Project Management Certificate · Course 5: Agile Project Management

This is the whole vocabulary of Course 5 as study notes for revision, grouped alphabetically so a term is quick to find. It is meant for the few minutes before a quiz, or for the moment a term turns up in a module and I want the short version without rereading the chapter.

A

Term	What it means
Acceptance criteria	The specific conditions a user story has to satisfy before it can be signed off as done. (they belong to one story; the Definition of Done applies to all work)
Adaptation	Changing the product, the plan or the way of working as soon as inspection shows things drifting, so the problem stops growing. The third pillar of Scrum.
Agile Manifesto	The 2001 statement of four values and twelve principles that describes the mindset every Agile team aims for.
Agile project management	Running projects and teams in a flexible, feedback-driven way built on the Agile Manifesto. (Agile is the mindset; Scrum is one framework that puts it to work)
Ambiguity	Not being able to tell what is really causing events, so misreading the situation is easy. The A in VUCA.

B

Term	What it means
Backlog refinement	The ongoing housekeeping that keeps the backlog in order: items described clearly, estimated and ranked so the team can pick up work without confusion.
Burndown chart	A chart plotting the work still left against the time still left, so the team sees whether it will finish by the end of the Sprint. (it tracks progress within a Sprint; velocity measures how much a team finishes per Sprint)
Business agility	Taking Agile principles beyond project teams and applying them to how the wider organisation is managed.
Business collaboration	The Agile principle theme of having customers and business people work closely with the team, so new information reaches the builders straight away and they can adjust. One of the four themes.

C

Term	What it means
Capacity	How much work a team realistically has room for in a set period, given who is available. (capacity is the room available; velocity is the pace a team has shown in past Sprints)
Case studies	Detailed, evidence-based write-ups of how a particular company, community or organisation handled something, used to learn from others’ wins and mistakes.
Change control board	The formal Waterfall body and procedure that must approve any change to agreed requirements. (Agile welcomes change instead of gating it)
Change management	Helping people actually take up a new product, process or set of values, rather than just announcing it.
Coaching	A two-way conversation style that builds a person’s skills, motivation and judgement instead of handing them answers.
Complexity	Having so many interconnected forces, parties and factors that a change in one ripples into the rest. The C in VUCA.
Continuous integration and continuous refactoring	The XP habit of merging changes into one shared version many times a day so problems with quality show up fast.
CSV file	A plain file of spreadsheet data where commas separate the values, short for comma separated values. Handy for importing a backlog into a tool such as Asana.
Cynefin framework	A sense-making model for judging how complex a situation is, sorting it into one of five domains: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, or disorder when you cannot tell.

D

Term	What it means
Daily Scrum	A short daily check-in, 15 minutes at most, where the Development Team looks at progress toward the Sprint Goal and replans the day. Also called the stand-up.
Definition of Done	The team’s shared checklist that any piece of work must pass before it counts as finished. (applies to every item; acceptance criteria are specific to one story)
Deliverable	Something concrete the project produces and hands over.
Development Team	The people in a Scrum Team who build the product, also called the Developers. (they own the how; the Product Owner owns the what and the Scrum Master the when)
DevOps	A cultural and organisational movement that brings development and operations together to ship software faster, run it more reliably and share ownership of it.
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)	A hybrid toolkit that borrows from Kanban, LeSS, Lean, XP, Agile Modeling and others, helping teams make process choices and build a scaled approach that suits their context.

E

Term	What it means
Empiricism	The belief that trustworthy knowledge comes from real experience and observation, not from prediction. The theory Scrum is built on.
Epic	A large piece of work too big for one Sprint, broken down into several related user stories. (the epic is the container; user stories are what it splits into)
Extreme Programming (XP)	An Agile method that pushes good development practices, such as testing early and often, to their limit to raise quality and respond quickly to customer needs.

F

Term	What it means
Five values of Scrum	The behaviours a Scrum Team commits to: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect. (values are how people behave; the three pillars are how the process works)
Flow	Kanban’s central aim of moving work smoothly and efficiently through the system, helped by limiting how much is in progress at once.

I

Term	What it means
I.N.V.E.S.T	A checklist for a well-written user story: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable.
Incremental	Building the product in small pieces, each adding to the ones before. (incremental is about what gets added; iterative is about the repeating cycle)
Influencer	Someone who can shift other people’s behaviour and beliefs in a way that produces lasting results, without needing formal authority.
Inspection	Checking the work and progress toward the Sprint Goal often enough to catch unwanted drift while it can still be fixed. The second pillar of Scrum.
Iterative	Working in repeated cycles, each one delivering and then learning from feedback. (iterative is the repeating loop; incremental is the growing product)

K

Term	What it means
Kanban	A visual method that shows the state of work on a board, classically in to do, in progress and done columns, with limits on work in progress. (Kanban is a continuous flow with no fixed roles or Sprints; Scrum uses timeboxed Sprints and three defined roles)

L

Term	What it means
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)	A framework for applying Scrum across many teams in a big organisation while keeping the focus on value and cutting waste.
Lean	A method whose core idea is stripping waste out of a process. It predates Agile and helped inspire it.

M

Term	What it means
Managing	Overseeing other people’s work: onboarding, running meetings, delegating, tracking performance, deciding and handling conflict. (managing directs the work; coaching develops the person)
Minimum viable product (MVP)	The earliest version of a product with only enough features to be useful to first customers and earn feedback. (an MVP is a market test of the product idea; an Increment is the finished output of any Sprint)
Mission	A short, lasting statement of why the team’s work matters, which stays the same for the whole project. (the mission is the why; the product vision is what the finished product looks like)

O

Term	What it means
Organizational culture	The values people in a workplace share, visible in how they behave, communicate and work together.

P

Term	What it means
Pair Programming	The XP practice of two people working on the same task at the same time, one building and one reviewing as they go.
Product Backlog	The one ordered list of everything the team might work on for the product: features, requirements and activities. Owned by the Product Owner. (the full list for the product; the Sprint Backlog is the slice chosen for one Sprint; the Increment is what gets built)
Product Goal	The future state the product is heading toward, which gives the Scrum Team a target to plan against.
Product increment	The usable, finished addition to the product that comes out of a Sprint and meets the Definition of Done. (the output of a Sprint; the backlogs are lists of work to do)
Product Owner	The Scrum role accountable for making the product as valuable as possible, mainly by owning and ordering the Product Backlog. (owns the what; the Development Team owns the how and the Scrum Master the when)
Product requirements document	The Waterfall document that fixes a project’s scope and requirements up front.
Product roadmap	A high-level view of where the product is going, what it needs and roughly when key milestones should land.
Product vision	A statement of what the product is, who it serves and how it supports the customer’s strategy, which also marks the team’s responsibilities and boundaries.

R

Term	What it means
Relative estimation	Sizing a task by comparing it with another task rather than guessing hours in isolation. (story points and T-shirt sizes are both forms of it)
Releasable	Finished and good enough to ship, meaning the team has reached a minimum viable version of that feature or requirement. Whether to actually release is the Product Owner’s call.
Release plans	A plan for roughly when specific features will reach users, holding a release goal, the backlog items included, a target date and other dates that affect it.
Requirements	The conditions that must be met or work that must be finished for the project to succeed.
Retrospectives and continuous learning	The Agile principle theme of regularly stopping to reflect on what is and is not working, then adjusting. One of the four themes.

S

Term	What it means
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)	A large-scale Lean-Agile framework drawing on Kanban, Scrum, XP, DevOps and Design Thinking, with delivering value as its top priority.
Scrum	A lightweight framework for building, delivering and maintaining complex products in short timeboxed Sprints. (Scrum is one framework; Agile is the broader mindset it serves)
Scrum Master	The Scrum role that helps the team live the Agile values and stick to the practices it agreed, coaching, removing blockers and shielding the team so it can do its best work. (owns the when; not a manager of scope)
Scrum of Scrums	A way of coordinating several small Scrum Teams on the same product, usually through a regular meeting of representatives from each team.
Solution Design Sprint	A whole Sprint given over to designing the solution rather than building it.
Spotify model	Spotify’s own take on scaling Agile, built on autonomous squads, tribes, chapters and guilds, with a strong emphasis on culture, communication and accountability. Meant to inspire, not to copy.
Sprint	A fixed-length stretch of time, one to four weeks, in which the team completes a planned set of work.
Sprint Backlog	The Product Backlog items picked for the coming Sprint, together with the Developers’ plan for delivering them. (a subset of the Product Backlog, owned by the Developers)
Sprint Planning	The event that opens a Sprint, where the whole Scrum Team agrees what will be done and how.
Sprint Retrospective	The event at the end of a Sprint, up to three hours, where the team looks at how it worked together and picks improvements. (looks inward at the process; the Sprint Review looks at the product)
Sprint Review	The event where the team shows what it built to stakeholders and works out what is finished and what still needs doing. (about the product and the backlog; the Retrospective is about how the team worked)
Stacey Matrix	A grid that places a project by how much agreement there is on requirements and how certain the way of delivering them is, helping a project manager choose a decision-making style.
Story points	A unitless score given to user stories or tasks to express their relative effort and risk. (a relative estimate, not hours)

T

Term	What it means
T-shirt sizes	A quick, rough estimation method that sorts work into XS, S, M, L, XL or XXL by the time, budget and energy it will need.
Team dynamics and culture	The Agile principle theme of building an inclusive, supportive and empowered team. One of the four themes.
Three pillars of Scrum	The foundations of Scrum’s empirical approach: transparency, inspection and adaptation. (the pillars are the process; the five values are the behaviour that makes them work)
Timebox	The fixed maximum length set for a Scrum event or piece of work.
Transparency	Keeping the important parts of the work visible to everyone responsible for the result. The first pillar of Scrum.

U

Term	What it means
Uncertainty	Not being able to predict what comes next, so surprises are likely. The U in VUCA.
User story	A short, plain description of a feature written from the point of view of the person who will use it. (the smallest unit of backlog work; several stories roll up into an epic)

V

Term	What it means
Value delivery	The Agile principle theme of getting work into customers’ hands as early as possible to earn feedback and reduce the risk of building the wrong thing. One of the four themes.
Value roadmap	An Agile roadmap laying out the timeline and requirements for developing the product, arranged around delivering value.
Velocity	How much work, usually in story points, a team typically completes in one Sprint, used to forecast future Sprints. (measured across Sprints; a burndown chart shows progress inside one)
Volatility	How fast and how often things change in a business or situation. The V in VUCA.
VUCA	Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity: the conditions of a fast-changing world, and a signal that Agile may suit a project.

W

Term	What it means
Waterfall project management	The traditional approach that runs project phases one after another in a fixed sequence.
Work-in-progress (WIP) limit	A cap, set by the team, on how many items can be actively worked on at the same time. Central to Kanban flow.

Where these come up

Agile 1 - The Fundamentals of Agile - Agile’s origins, VUCA, the Manifesto’s values and principles, iterative and incremental delivery, Waterfall against Agile, Scrum, Kanban, XP, Lean and scaling.
Agile 2 - Scrum 101 - empiricism, the three pillars, the five values, mission and product vision, and the three Scrum roles.
Agile 3 - Implementing Scrum - backlog, user stories, estimation, the five Scrum events, velocity, burndown and tools.
Agile 4 - Applying Agile - value-driven delivery, roadmaps, change management, coaching, scaling and interviews.