Agile Retrospectives: Make Good Teams Great

Scrum is a lightweight framework for delivering complex work in fixed-length iterations called sprints, with three accountabilities, five events and three artefacts, defined in a short public guide.

A sprint is a fixed-length iteration of one month or less in which a team plans a goal, builds a usable increment toward it, shows the result, and reviews how it worked, before the next sprint begins immediately.

A product backlog is the single ordered list of everything that might be done to improve a product, owned by one person who decides the order, refined continuously, and drawn from when each iteration is planned.

A statement of work is the document that commits one bounded piece of work to paper: what gets built, on which assumptions, to what deadline, for what money, and what sits outside it.

Scope creep is the quiet expansion of a priced piece of client work through additions that each look too minor to renegotiate, until what gets delivered is substantially larger than what was sold.

A retainer is a recurring fee that holds a supplier's time or availability open across a period, so what the client buys is first call on somebody's attention rather than any named artefact.