- Acceptance Criteria – Measurable terms of what must be done for a user story to be acceptable to the stakeholders.
- Backlog – Sometimes called a Product Backlog, the Backlog is a collection of user stories and tasks the development team will work on at some point in the future. Initially, this list consists of all obvious functionality, and it is allowed to grow and change as more is learned about the software.
- Iteration – Sometimes called a Sprint, an iteration is a fixed, specific length of time resulting in a small but complete piece of working software. Multiple iterations combined create a fully integrated product.
- Planning Poker – Planning Poker is a consensus-based estimation technique for estimating. Using this methodology, individual user stories are presented for estimation, and after a period of discussion, each developer chooses from his own deck the numbered card that represents his estimate of how much work is involved in the story being discussed. All estimates are kept private until each participant has chosen a card. At that time, all estimates are revealed and discussion can begin again. The method has been popularized by Mike Cohn in his book Agile Estimating and Planning, and studies have credited it with less optimistic and more accurate estimations than other methods (K. Molokken-Ostvold and N.C. Haugen)
- Retrospective – A meeting where a development team looks back on the previous iteration so that they can learn from their experience and apply this learning to future projects.
- Stakeholders – Customer representatives from the business who are actively engaged in the project. They prioritize user stories and give real-time feedback throughout iterations.
- Story Points – A measure of magnitude of a paticular user story, and it\’s size relative to the size of other user stories. Story points enable effort to be estimated without trying to estimate how long it will take.
- User Stories – A very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it.