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

When "simple design" choices have far-reaching consequences, two or more developers meet for a quick design session at a whiteboard.
An approach to estimation used by Agile teams. Each team member "plays" a card bearing a numerical value corresponding to a point estimation for a user story.
Agile projects are iterative insofar as they intentionally allow for "repeating" software development activities, and for potentially "revisiting" the same work products (the phrase "planned rework" is sometimes used; refactoring is a good example).
Backlog grooming is when the product owner and some, or all, of the rest of the team refine the backlog on a regular basis to ensure the backlog contains the appropriate items, that they are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery.
A sprint backlog is the subset of product backlog that a team targets to deliver during a sprint to accomplish the sprint goal and progress toward an outcome.
A "team" in the Agile sense is a small group of people, assigned to the same project or effort, nearly all of them on a full-time basis.
Agile projects are iterative insofar as they intentionally allow for "repeating" software development activities, and for potentially "revisiting" the same work products (the phrase "planned rework" is sometimes used; refactoring is a good example).

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