Agile Glossary

Three Questions

What is Three Questions?

The daily meeting is structured around some variant of the following three questions:

  • What have you completed since the last meeting?
  • What do you plan to complete by the next meeting?
  • What is getting in your way?

Common Pitfalls

The intent of these questions is to emphasize the completion of tasks, rather than the effort spent. While it is common to hear “yesterday I worked on X… today I will continue working on X… everything’s fine,” this is a mistake (hilariously caricatured as the “Scrum Zombie” pattern); it is better to say “I pass.” Having a clear definition of done may help overcome this.

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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

The acronym INVEST stands for a set of criteria used to assess the quality of a user story. If the story fails to meet one of these criteria, the team may want to reword it.
The Given-When-Then formula is a template intended to guide the writing of acceptance tests for a User Story: (Given) some context, (When) some action is carried out, (Then) a particular set of observable consequences should obtain.
A unit test is a short program fragment which exercises some narrow part of the product's source code and checks the results.
Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software development framework that aims to produce higher quality software, and higher quality of life for the development team. XP is the most specific of the agile frameworks regarding appropriate engineering practices for software development.
Continuous deployment can be thought of as an extension of continuous integration, aiming at minimizing lead time, the time elapsed between development writing one new line of code and this new code being used by live users, in production.
Rules of Simplicity is a set of criteria, in priority order, proposed by Kent Beck to judge whether some source code is "simple enough."

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