Glossary

Kanban, agile, and scrum, in plain language.

Every term your team actually uses — kanban boards, sprints, WIP limits, burndown charts — defined without the jargon.

A–Z

Agile

Agile is an approach to work that delivers in small, frequent increments and adapts to change, rather than planning everything up front. It comes from the Agile Manifesto (2001), which values individuals, working software, and responding to change over processes and plans. Scrum and kanban are both agile methodologies.

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Backlog

A backlog is the ordered list of everything a team might work on — bugs, tasks, features, improvements — that has not been started. The highest-priority items sit at the top and get pulled into the board when the team has capacity. A healthy backlog is the team's source of truth for what comes next.

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Burndown chart

A burndown chart plots the amount of work remaining (vertical axis) against the time left in a sprint (horizontal axis). The ideal line slopes steadily to zero; the actual line shows how the team is really pacing. Burndown charts are scrum's standard way to answer 'will we finish this sprint?'

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Issue tracker

An issue tracker is software where a team records bugs, tasks, and feature requests as issues, assigns owners, and tracks each one through to done. It replaces the spreadsheet-and-chat approach with a single searchable backlog. Issue trackers are the category that includes Jira, Linear, Trello, and Nimbus.

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Kanban

Kanban is a work management method that visualizes work as cards on a board, limits how much work is in progress at once, and lets work flow continuously through stages instead of in fixed cycles. It originated at Toyota in the 1940s and was formalized for knowledge work by David J. Anderson in the 2000s.

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Kanban board

A kanban board is a visual tool that organizes work into columns representing stages of a workflow, such as Todo, In Progress, and Done. Each task is a card that moves from left to right as it progresses. Kanban boards give a team a single, shared view of all work in flight, which is why they are the backbone of kanban-style project management.

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Project management

Project management is the practice of planning, organizing, and tracking work so a team delivers a goal on time. It covers scope, people, priorities, and progress. Modern project management is increasingly visual — kanban boards, backlogs, and shared views replace Gantt charts and status reports for most software and operations teams.

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Scrum

Scrum is an agile framework that organizes work into fixed sprints, typically one to four weeks, with three roles (product owner, scrum master, developers) and four ceremonies (sprint planning, daily standup, review, retrospective). It is the most widely used agile methodology and the one Jira is built around.

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Sprint

A sprint is a fixed period, typically one to four weeks, during which an agile team commits to completing a set of work pulled from the backlog. At the end of the sprint, the team reviews what shipped and starts the next cycle. Sprints are the core timebox of scrum, and the rhythm many kanban teams still use for planning.

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User story

A user story is a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who needs it, typically formatted as 'As a [user], I want [goal], so that [benefit]'. User stories keep the focus on the outcome rather than the implementation, and they are the standard unit of work in agile backlogs.

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WIP limit

A WIP (work-in-progress) limit is the maximum number of cards a column may hold at once. When a column hits its limit, the team must finish existing work before pulling new work in. WIP limits are kanban's pressure valve: they force finishing over starting and surface bottlenecks immediately.

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Workflow

A workflow is the defined path a piece of work follows from start to finish — for example, Todo, In Progress, In Review, Done. On a kanban board, the workflow becomes the columns. Designing a workflow means deciding the minimum stages your work genuinely passes through, and the rules for moving between them.

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