Some Simple Scrum Words
So, after drifting on a life raft of unemployment for over five months, I’m set adrift in a scrum lagoon. I have a few scrum vocabulary words to remember—those learned so far:
Sprint
“A time period (typically 2–4 weeks) in which development occurs on a set of backlog items that the Team has committed to.”
Story
Evidently “story” refers to a use story or user story. “In Scrum, work is expressed in the backlog as user stories. A team may write its user stories in a number of ways as long as they are written from the perspective of the end user. Put another way, team members are encouraged to think of their work from the perspective of who will use it (hence ‘user’ story). A team can express a story as a noun (i.e. ‘text message’ on a cell phone project) or a sentence or phrase (i.e. ‘debug GPS tracking system’).”—scrummethodology.com
Iteration
I was perhaps more biased toward Iterative Waterfall Development… “This approach carries less risk than a traditional Waterfall approach but is still far more risky and less efficient than a more Agile approaches. The focus is on delivering a sprint of work as opposed to a series of valuable/shippable features. The most commonly occurring issue in this type of scenario (in my experience) is bottle necking.” —agile101.net
Sadly, I strongly suspect that my current gainful employment is based on confusion between “delivering a sprint of work as opposed to a series of valuable/shippable features.” I’m paid right now to remove bottle necks—I can only hope that I’m not working in a bottle neck factory.