Professional Scrum Developer Glossary

Question 1

What is A/B Testing?

Answer 1

A/B Testing extends the idea of hypothesis driven development by evaluating two or more different implementations to find out which one works best.

It usually involves routing a part of users to each implementation to measure user behavior.

Question 2

Define Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD).

Answer 2

ATDD is a test-first software development practice where acceptance criteria for new functionality are created as automated tests.

Failing tests are constructed to pass as development proceeds.

Question 3

What does Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) refer to?

Answer 3

ALM is a holistic view on the management of software applications and systems, accounting for all stages of a software product’s existence.

Question 4

What is Application Telemetry?

Answer 4

Application Telemetry provides insights into product usage, showing usage statistics, performance parameters, user workflows, and other relevant information.

Question 5

Explain Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).

Answer 5

BDD is an agile software development practice that adds the description of desired functional behavior to Test-Driven Development (TDD).

Question 6

What is a Blameless Postmortem?

Answer 6

A Blameless Postmortem aims to understand systemic factors leading to an outage and identify learnings to prevent future failures.

Question 7

What is Blue-Green Deployment?

Answer 7

Blue-Green Deployment is a practice that reduces downtime during upgrades by using two identical environments: one handling production and the other for updates.

Question 8

Define Branching in version control.

Answer 8

Branching is creating a logical or physical copy of code within a version control system to change it in isolation.

Question 9

What characterizes Clean Code?

Answer 9

Clean Code is well-expressed, correctly formatted, and organized for later coders to understand, emphasizing clarity over cleverness.

Question 10

What does Code Coverage measure?

Answer 10

Code Coverage measures the amount of product code that is exercised by tests.

Question 11

Differentiate between Cohesion and Coupling.

Answer 11

Cohesion refers to how related the functions within a single module are, while Coupling refers to interdependencies between modules.

Question 12

What is Collective Code Ownership?

Answer 12

Collective Code Ownership is a principle where all contributors to a codebase are jointly responsible for the entirety of the code.

Question 13

Define Continuous Delivery.

Answer 13

Continuous Delivery is a software delivery practice that requires human action to promote changes into a subsequent environment.

Question 14

What is Continuous Deployment?

Answer 14

Continuous Deployment is a practice where the release process is fully automated, promoting changes to production without human intervention.

Question 15

Explain Continuous Integration (CI).

Answer 15

CI is an agile software development practice where newly checked-in code is built, integrated, and tested frequently, often multiple times a day.

Question 16

What is Continuous Testing?

Answer 16

Continuous Testing integrates testing as an ongoing part of development to identify and fix issues earlier, lowering risk significantly.

Question 17

Define Cycle Time.

Answer 17

Cycle Time is the duration between starting work on an item and its completion, usually delivered to end-users.

Question 18

What is Cyclomatic Complexity?

Answer 18

Cyclomatic Complexity is a measure of code complexity based on the number of independent logical branches in a codebase.

Question 19

What does Cross-functional mean in a team context?

Answer 19

Cross-functional refers to a team having all the skills required to produce a releasable Increment within a Sprint.

Question 20

What is the Definition of Done?

Answer 20

The Definition of Done is a shared understanding of expectations that software must meet to be releasable into production.

Question 21

Who is considered a Developer in Scrum?

Answer 21

A Developer is any member of a Scrum Team committed to creating any aspect of a usable Increment each Sprint.

Question 22

What is DevOps?

Answer 22

DevOps is an organizational concept that bridges the gap between development and operations, focusing on skills, mindset, and practices.

Question 23

Define Dev & Ops collaboration.

Answer 23

Dev & Ops collaboration is the key principle of DevOps, emphasizing joint responsibility for development and operations.

Question 24

What does DRY stand for in software development?

Answer 24

DRY stands for ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself,’ a principle to avoid repetition of information in a system.

Question 25

What are Engineering Standards?

Answer 25

Engineering Standards are shared development and technology standards applied by Developers to create releasable Increments.

Question 26

Explain Error Culture.

Answer 26

Error Culture refers to how mistakes are handled, impacting an organization's ability to innovate and encouraging experimentation.

Question 27

What is Extreme Programming (XP)?

Answer 27

XP is an agile software development framework focusing on programming practices to create and release high-quality code.

Question 28

Define Feature Flags/Feature Toggle.

Answer 28

Feature Flags allow the dynamic activation or deactivation of functionality without affecting overall system accessibility.

Question 29

What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

Answer 29

MVP is the smallest implementation of a product or feature to learn how users will react to it.

Question 30

What is Monitoring in a software context?

Answer 30

Monitoring is used to continuously check the current state of a system, triggering alarms when parameters are out of the healthy range.

Question 31

Define Non-functional Requirement.

Answer 31

Non-functional requirements define criteria to evaluate a product's operation rather than its specific behaviors.

Question 32

What is Pair Programming?

Answer 32

Pair Programming is an agile practice where two team members jointly create new functionality.

Question 33

What is Refactoring?

Answer 33

Refactoring is the practice of adjusting code within a codebase without changing its external functional behavior.

Question 34

What are Release-Pipelines?

Answer 34

Release-Pipelines automate the steps from code commit to delivery in production, increasing speed and reliability.

Question 35

What is the Scout Rule?

Answer 35

The Scout Rule is the practice of leaving the codebase in a better state than it was found before modifications.

Question 36

Define Scrum.

Answer 36

Scrum is a framework that supports teams in complex product development, consisting of Scrum Teams, accountabilities, events, artifacts, and rules.

Question 37

What is a Scrum Board?

Answer 37

A Scrum Board visualizes information within the Scrum Team and is often used to manage the Sprint Backlog.

Question 38

What is the Scrum Guide?

Answer 38

The Scrum Guide defines Scrum, including its accountabilities, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together.

Question 39

What is a Scrum Team?

Answer 39

A Scrum Team is a self-managing team consisting of a Product Owner, Development Team, and Scrum Master.

Question 40

What does Self-Managing mean in Scrum Teams?

Answer 40

Self-Managing means Scrum Teams internally decide who does what, when, and how.

Question 41

What is Specification by Example?

Answer 41

Specification by Example is a practice using realistic examples from past experience instead of abstract statements to describe desired functionality.

Question 42

What is Test-Automation?

Answer 42

Test-Automation increases product quality and reduces cycle time by automating tests to provide faster feedback.

Question 43

Define Test-Driven Development (TDD).

Answer 43

TDD is a test-first practice where test cases are defined before executable code is created to pass those tests.

Question 44

What is Technical Debt?

Answer 44

Technical Debt is the overhead of maintaining a product, often due to less-than-ideal design decisions.

Question 45

What is Testing in Production?

Answer 45

Testing in Production involves executing tests directly in the production environment to reduce cycle time and improve test reliability.

Question 46

What is a User Story?

Answer 46

A User Story expresses requirements from an end-user perspective, emphasizing verbal communication.

Question 47

Define Unit Test.

Answer 47

A Unit Test is a low-level technical test focusing on small parts of a software system that can be executed quickly and in isolation.

Question 48

What is Velocity in Scrum?

Answer 48

Velocity is an indication of the amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment during a Sprint, tracked by Developers.

Question 49

What are Vertical Teams?

Answer 49

Vertical Teams combine all necessary competencies to handle the entire process from feedback to delivery without handoffs.