Why this matters
When you join a team, you will hear words like sprint, story, acceptance criteria and stand up from the first day. Adverts for testing roles in Ghana and on remote boards often mention Agile and Jira. Knowing the vocabulary means you can start contributing quickly instead of spending weeks working out what people mean.
Agile and Scrum in plain words
Agile is a family of ways of working where teams deliver software in small pieces, get feedback and adjust. Scrum is one popular Agile method. Its key parts:
- Sprint: a fixed cycle, often one or two weeks, in which the team aims to finish a set of work.
- Backlog: the ordered list of all work waiting to be done.
- Sprint planning: a meeting at the start of each sprint to choose work from the backlog.
- Stand up: a short daily meeting where each person says what they did, what they will do and what is blocking them.
- Review and retrospective: at the end of the sprint, the team shows what was built and discusses how to work better.
Not every team uses Scrum exactly. Some use Kanban, a continuous flow of work across a board without fixed sprints. The habits of small pieces, visible work and regular feedback are common to both.