Term	Definition	Example
Refine / refinement	The meeting where a vague ticket becomes buildable. “Grooming” is the older word for the same meeting; “refinement” is the standard term the Scrum Guide uses today.	"Alright — refinement session. Thirty minutes, one ticket, and the goal is to walk out of here with something the team can actually estimate on Thursday."
Acceptance criteria	The specific, testable conditions a piece of work must meet before it counts as done. Always plural — the singular is “criterion.”	"Let's write the acceptance criteria, right here, while we're all on the call. What does 'done' actually look like for this ticket?"
Scope	What a piece of work covers, and what it doesn’t. The line the team draws around a ticket before estimating it.	"Scope: email-based password reset only. SMS is out of scope, tracked as its own ticket."
Out of scope	The fixed phrase for drawing that boundary. Two words, always together, no article — never “out of the scope.”	"SMS verification is out of scope for this sprint — let's keep it to email only, and we open a separate ticket for SMS so it doesn't get lost."
Assumption / assume	A belief treated as true without being confirmed out loud. Every ticket has them; refinement is where the team surfaces them before they turn into rework.	"I just assumed you'd do both. Isn't that standard?"
Clarify / clarification	To make something clear by asking about it or restating it in your own words. “Just to clarify —” is the standard softener that opens the question.	"Just to clarify — a minute ago you said they get a code and type it in. The criteria we just wrote say they get a link and click it."
Dependency	Something outside your own team that you need before you can finish. Contrasted with Episode 1’s “blocked” — a dependency is named in advance; blocked means work has already stopped.	"We have a dependency on the email service team. They need to give us API access to the transactional templates before I can send a single test email."
Edge case	Recycled from Episode 4. A scenario at the boundary of expected behaviour — moved here from a code-review context into a requirements context, where it’s far cheaper to catch.	"One more, and this is the edge case I keep circling back to. What happens when the user's email address has changed since they registered?"
Estimate	Recycled from Episode 2. The goal refinement feeds into — you can’t honestly estimate a ticket until its scope and criteria are clear.	"That's refinement in one sentence, honestly. Alright — this is estimable now. We'll size it in Thursday's planning session."
Pull request	Recycled from Episode 4. Used naturally here when the team scopes the work into separate, reviewable pieces.	"Shape-wise, this is probably two pull requests. One for the reset flow and the token logic, one for wiring up the email template once design delivers."

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