Agile Glossary

Facilitation

What is Facilitation?

A facilitator is a person who chooses or is given the explicit role of conducting a meeting. This role usually entails that the facilitator will take little part in the discussions on the meeting’s topic, but will focus primarily on creating the conditions for effective group processes, in the pursuit of the objectives for which the meeting was convened.

Facilitation is a specialization of its own, the details of which go well beyond Agile practices; a good introduction is material provided by the International Association of Facilitators.

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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

Scrum is a process framework used to manage product development and other knowledge work. Scrum is empirical in that it provides a means for teams to establish a hypothesis of how they think something works, try it out, reflect on the experience, and make the appropriate adjustments. That is, when the framework is used properly.
An acceptance test is a formal description of the behavior of a software product, generally expressed as an example or a usage scenario. A number of different notations and approaches have been proposed for such examples or scenarios.
In the context of software development, build refers to the process that converts files and other assets under the developers' responsibility into a software product in its final or consumable form. The build is automated when these steps are repeatable, require no direct human intervention, and can be performed at any time with no information other than what is stored in the source code control repository.
Splitting consists of breaking up one user story into smaller ones, while preserving the property that each user story separately has measurable business value.
Pair programming consists of two programmers sharing a single workstation (one screen, keyboard and mouse among the pair). The programmer at the keyboard is usually called the "driver", the other, also actively involved in the programming task but focusing more on overall direction is the "navigator"; it is expected that the programmers swap roles every few minutes or so.

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