Chapter 6: Vocabulary

As in every company we have over time developed a vocabulary specific to our work and team. Some of them might sound familiar to you, but we might use the words differently from other contexts.

Backlog: This is the starting point where our ideas come to life. The Edkimo backlog is hosted on Trello. We add one ticket for each idea.

Deploy: Usually we add new features to our Staging server where we can test them. Once a week we roll out all the new features to our production server. This is the deploy.

Jitsi: If we want to call a video conference we usually say “Let’s meet on Jitsi.” This open source video conference tool works in any browser, needs no installation or signup and we use it for our meetings and workshops: https://meet.jit.si

OER: Open Educational Resources. Our questionnaire templates are all OER, which means they are published under a Creative Commons Licences CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. OER material can be reused, remixed and adapted.

One-on-One-Meeting: These are short weekly meetings between a team member and a manager. Usually to start the week, say hello, talk about life, ideas, conflicts, and solutions.

Production: This is our live server where the Edkimo app is running and accessible to all users.

Refinement: The product team goes over the tickets in the backlog once every two weeks. We add details and prioritize existing tickets, or archive tickets we won’t do. Sometimes we call it “grooming”.

Retrospective: every three months we look back at how we have worked as a team. Three little questions, a discussion and goals how to improve.

Surveys, templates, results: Think of a questionnaire, but keep in mind that it might refer to a state and a process. We try to keep our language concise. We speak of survey, when we want to focus on the process of sending out the questionnaire to a group of participants. We speak of template when we talk about the questionnaire itself that can then be used to start a survey.

Staging: We have a special server to test new features before we deploy them into production.

Superadmin: The Edkimo office team has a special backend to set up user and organization accounts. The superadmin supports the teamadmins.

Teamadmin: The person in a team who manages the whole team: invites new team members, publishes questionnaire templates, and aggregates results for reports.

Ticket: They help us keep track of our ideas, refine and discuss them with the whole team before we start to develop a new feature. We also write a ticket for a bug fix. Let’s keep it simple: 1 bug = 1 ticket. And 1 idea = 1 ticket.

Visible Learning: This concept is based on John Hattie’s meta-study Visible Learning (2009). The bottom line to improving learning is: “Help teachers see learning through their students’ eyes, and students become their own teachers.”

Weekly: This is our weekly all-hands meeting. Usually on Jitsi at the end of the week.