✦ Glossary
Project management terms, explained simply
35 definitions for agile, Scrum, Kanban and classic project planning, each with an example.
A
Acceptance criteria
Acceptance criteria are the specific conditions a user story must satisfy to be accepted, written so they can be checked or tested.
Agile
Agile is an approach to project work that delivers in small, frequent increments and adapts the plan based on feedback, instead of fixing everything up front.
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Daily stand-up
The daily stand-up is a short meeting, usually fifteen minutes, where a team syncs on progress toward its goal and raises anything that is blocking work.
Definition of done
The definition of done is a shared checklist of conditions every piece of work must meet before a team calls it finished.
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M
Milestone
A milestone is a significant point or event in a project, such as a launch or approval, used to mark progress rather than to represent work.
MVP (minimum viable product)
A minimum viable product is the smallest version of a product that delivers value to real users and lets a team learn whether the idea works.
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S
Scope creep
Scope creep is the gradual, uncontrolled growth of a project's requirements after it has started, without matching changes to time, budget or resources.
Scrum
Scrum is an agile framework in which a small team delivers work in fixed length sprints, guided by a product owner and a scrum master, with regular planning, review and retrospective meetings.
SLA (service level agreement)
An SLA is a commitment about how quickly work will be handled, typically a target time to first respond to and to resolve a request.
Sprint
A sprint is a short, fixed period, usually one to four weeks, in which a Scrum team completes a chosen set of work and produces a usable result.
Sprint planning
Sprint planning is the meeting at the start of a sprint where the team agrees on a sprint goal and chooses the backlog items it will deliver.
Sprint retrospective
A sprint retrospective is a meeting at the end of each sprint where the team reflects on how it worked and agrees on improvements for the next sprint.
Stakeholder
A stakeholder is anyone who is affected by a project or can affect it, such as customers, sponsors, users, team members and other departments.
Story points
Story points are a relative unit for estimating the effort, complexity and uncertainty of a piece of work, compared with other work rather than measured in hours.
Sub-task
A sub-task is a smaller piece of work that belongs to a parent issue, used to split a story or task into steps that can be assigned and tracked separately.
Swimlane
A swimlane is a horizontal row on a Kanban board that groups cards, for example by person, epic or priority, so different streams of work are easy to tell apart.
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WIP limit
A WIP (work in progress) limit caps how many items can be in a stage of a Kanban board at once, so the team finishes work before starting more.
Work breakdown structure (WBS)
A work breakdown structure is a hierarchy that divides a project into smaller deliverables and work packages until each piece is small enough to plan and assign.
Workflow
In project management tools, a workflow is the set of statuses an item moves through and the transitions allowed between them, from creation to completion.