Effort Estimation: how to estimate and get better every day

A retrospective is a regular, structured meeting in which a team examines how it worked over the last period, decides what to change, and commits to one or two concrete improvements for the next one.

Incident management is the service-management practice of restoring a disrupted IT service to normal operation as quickly as possible, through a defined process of logging, categorising, prioritising, resolving and closing each incident, separate from the later work of finding and fixing its root cause.

A project charter is the short document that formally authorises a project, names its sponsor and manager, states its purpose, its intended outcomes and its boundaries, and gives the manager the authority to spend the organisation's resources on it.

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.

A day rate sells a bounded unit of a supplier's working time rather than a finished result, so the client rather than the supplier carries the risk that the job turns out bigger than it looked.

A client brief is the short written statement of what a piece of work has to achieve, for whom, and under which fixed constraints, agreed before either side commits to a solution.