Agile Glossary

Automated tests that concentrate on verifying that code works as written, and which act as safety flags in high-churn agile development environments with frequent check-ins, changes, and multiple developers in the same code base. The outcome of a unit test is binary: either "pass" if the program's behavior is consistent with the recorded expectations, or "fail" otherwise. By convention dating back at least to the JUnit family of tools, the color red (as in "getting a red bar") represents a failure of one or more tests, and the color green ("a green bar") denotes successful test execution. It is a common practice to automatically execute unit tests as part of every build.

A way of expressing a reasonably small unit of work that needs to be done to meet a particular customer or user need and thereby provide business value. User stories are articulated in such a way that they are understandable for both business people and technical people. It is a common practice to include a sentence in a format similar to “As a I want so that I get .” A user story is also an "invitation to a conversation" where a team makes sure they have a good enough understanding of the user story that they can build it without further conversation (see also the "3Cs"). When writing user stories on physical media (post-it notes or index cards) or in an electronic tool, it is important to agree on what the baseline set of attributes is for any given user story, for instance, story title/headline, story description, Acceptance Criteria.