Developer Glossary

A user story is a short, plain-language description of a software feature written from the end user's perspective, typically following the format: 'As a [user], I want [goal] so that [benefit].'

Acceptance criteria are the specific conditions a user story must satisfy to be considered complete and accepted by the product owner or stakeholder.

Vibe coding is a style of software development where a programmer describes what they want in natural language and an AI writes the actual code, with the human guiding direction rather than writing every line.

Sprint planning is an agile ceremony where a team selects user stories from the backlog to work on during an upcoming sprint, estimates effort, and commits to a sprint goal.

A Kanban board is a visual project management tool that organises work items into columns representing stages of a workflow, helping teams track progress and limit work in progress.

Story points are a unit of measure used in agile development to estimate the relative effort, complexity, and uncertainty of user stories, typically using a Fibonacci sequence scale.

An AI coding agent is an autonomous software system that can read a feature description, write code to implement it, create git branches, run tests, and open pull requests with minimal human intervention.

Given/When/Then is a structured format for writing acceptance criteria and test scenarios that describes a precondition (Given), a user action (When), and an expected outcome (Then).

Definition of done (DoD) is a team-agreed checklist of criteria that every user story must meet before it can be considered complete and accepted, ensuring consistent quality across all delivered work.

Backlog grooming (also called backlog refinement) is the ongoing process of reviewing, prioritising, estimating, and adding detail to user stories in a product backlog before they are pulled into a sprint.