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

Continuous deployment can be thought of as an extension of continuous integration, aiming at minimizing lead time, the time elapsed between development writing one new line of code and this new code being used by live users, in production.
Rules of Simplicity is a set of criteria, in priority order, proposed by Kent Beck to judge whether some source code is "simple enough."
The daily meeting is structured around the following three questions: What have you completed? What will you do next? What is getting in your way?
The team has the use of a dedicated space for the duration of the project, set apart from other groups' activities.
The team meets regularly to reflect on the most significant events that occurred since the previous such meeting, and identify opportunities for improvement.
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.
Sprint planning is an event that occurs at the beginning of a sprint where the team determines the product backlog items they will work on during that sprint and discusses their initial plan for completing those product backlog items.

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