Glossary

Portfolio Optimization | Glossary

Definition:

Portfolio optimization is the process of selecting best portfolio from a list of portfolios or assets by analyzing measuring the threshold of return on investments, and level of credit risk across entire organization. The main factors being considered, to meet some business objectives such as expected return, minimized levels of financial risk, and from assets, earnings, liabilities and other tangible investments to intangible factors.

Portfolio Optimization is performed to analyze what if conditions of all assets and improve the portfolio performance and meet business requirements. It helps to strategically manage product portfolios to determine losses and assess the capital adequacy under changing economic conditions. Portfolio Optimization and Strategic planning solutions enable to identify optimal investment scenarios, ensuring bigger project outcomes that align to short and long-term product development goals.

Further Reading:

Book: Disciplined Agile Delivery by Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth S. Rubin

Ceremony | Glossary

Definition:

Ceremony is a ritualistic or symbolic activity, performed on well-defined occasions. In Agile Development, ceremony is referred to as the core Scrum activities such as sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Ceremony is also defined as a Scrum practice that involves taking action or performing a process, for example, sprint-planning activity, daily scrum activity, sprint review activity, and sprint retrospective activity. In general all these activities are the work performed by the Scrum team members such as writing code, performing tests, creating estimates, and so on.

Meetings, or “ceremonies” are an important part of agile development. A number of these ceremonies come from the practice of scrum which is an iterative, time-boxed approach to implementing agile. The concepts behind these ceremonies can be applied to other forms of agile like kanban or lean.

Further Reading:

Book: Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide by Craig Larman

Book: Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process by Bob Aiello, Leslie Sachs