Adopt: Adopt is the final phase of the Pega Express that encompasses business readiness including training, go-live planning, the production deployment, and release retrospectives

Benefit Value Analysis: An approach that decomposes processes/journeys into low-level steps and explores the value each step brings to the overall experience. This is achieved through a series of workshops that: introduces the objectives of the process; identifies the key functions of the process; explores new ideas for improving the process; prioritizes the ideas based on the value

Build: Build is the 3rd phase of Pega Express that describes how to iteratively build & test a Pega application and to refine more user stories during each sprint. The output is working software, that both meet definitions of done and passes all the relevant tests.

Business Architect (BA): A role that drives working sessions to further understand microjourney steps and to create the user stories used by the technical team. Different levels are Senior, Lead and Principle BA.

Case Type Backlog: The Case Type Backlog (CTB) is a tool whose primary role is to capture simply the key constructs (data, interfaces, personas, and channels) required to build the selected high-value microjourneys™ in Pega and to define the scope for the first MLP release. The CTB facilitates also quick project sizing and is a key handover document from the Discover phase to the project team at the beginning of the prepare phase.

Change Request: A change request is anything that impacts the objectives, cost, timeline, or resources on a project. Even changes that have no cost impact should be logged. A change may be instigated by the project team or the customer. Change requests should be recorded on the weekly Project Status Report and in a changelog.

Corporate Governance Meetings: Corporate governance meetings ensure understanding at a corporate level and provide an overview of all interactions between companies. They also review and resolve escalated issues between companies.

Day 1 Live Plan: Day 1 Live Plan is a deliverable that describes what will be different from the business’s perspective when the Minimum Loveable Product (MLP) goes live.

Definition of Done: Definition of Done maintains quality through sharing the criteria that the developers must adhere to before they declare that their development work is complete for user stories.

Delivery Hand Off meeting/Sales to Service transition: Delivery handoff meeting ensures that the Pega and Partner-led project teams prepare effectively by knowing what has been sold and what is expected in the delivery. This meeting must be held during the end of the Discovery has to provide continuity from the Discovery phase to the project team.

Design Sprint: Design Sprint is a process to quickly answer business questions through design, prototyping & testing.

Design Thinking: Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. (IDEO Definition)

DevOps: Devops are the tools and processes that create a continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline, supported by an automated process to quickly move applications from development through testing to deployment to Production.

Direct Capture of Objectives (DCO): The ability to directly and visually capture business outcomes while improving the way business and IT collaborate to achieve them. Pega Express encompasses Pega’s delivery methodology, and DCO is a tool and approach that supports it.

Discover: Discover is the first phase of Pega Express and is typically conducted as part of the sales cycle and/or during the development of a business case. Discover Phase includes deciding on the journey to build, agreeing the MLP, representing it graphically in a service blueprint, and getting the project ready to start. The output is an agreed scope, and a delivery team and all the infrastructure necessary in place.

Empathy Mapping: Empathy mapping is a simple technique to ensure a human-centered focus during a Design Sprint. Users are interviewed and observed in the context of their environment as they perform real tasks; the user narrates what they are doing as they complete the task, the observer asks questions to gain insight into the discrete steps and get to the underlying thought process.

End-to-End (E2E) Testing: E2E testing systematically tests all paths through the microjourney to prove interfaces, low-level user acceptance criteria, and microjourney-level acceptance criteria. This may be done on incremental chunks of the microjourney as they are completed in the sprints and then on the full e2e journey once it has been completed.

Epic: Epic is a description of capability that will take more than a sprint to implement.

Guardrail: Guardrail is the best practice within the Pega application. Guardrail is used to show a project’s compliance with Pega’s application design best practices.

Integration Designer: Integration Designer is a tool that can be used to view all the business objects, data views, object dependencies, and external systems in an application.

Pega Express Delivery: Pega Express Delivery is Pega’s approach to delivering Pega software solutions. It is an agile and design-centered delivery approach based on successfully delivering a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP) release made of up one or more customer journeys that are quickly implemented. There are four phases: Discover, Prepare, Build, and Adopt.

Pega ExpressTest Plan: Pega Express Test Plan plots a path through the application, guiding the test team towards testing use case by use case, testing in the order in which journeys, microjourneys, and solution capabilities are developed.

Journey Map: A journey map is simply a way of capturing the end to end to be a journey, in a format that will help align the team around the end objective and allow the journey to be broken down into stages and steps, and then user stories.

Journey: The series of interactions between a customer and an organization that occur as the customer pursues a specific goal (Forrester).

Lean Usability Testing: Lean usability testing is a fast and effective way to test designs with a small number of end-users from your target audience. Embracing the lean principle of moving from uncertainty to confidence, designs are tested iteratively throughout the delivery cycle.

Microjourney™: Microjourney™ is one of the business outcomes included in a journey.

Minimum Lovable Product (MLP): Minimum Loveable Product refers to the scope of the first release but can also be extended to subsequent releases. MLP refers to building something small with the least amount of effort that gives the customer something they would love, focusing on a major pain point or opportunity that provides a real benefit to the customer. The philosophy is to start with something small that will increase customer satisfaction. This is different to Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which typically delivers a functional but scaled-down product that aims to relieve a number of pain points all at once but may not necessarily increase customer satisfaction. 

PegaUnit: PegaUnit Testing is a Pega feature that automates the testing of rules. Unit testing should be utilized to automate the out-of-the-box Pega features available to the delivery team during the Build phase.

Performance Testing: Performance testing covers the traditional tests of load, stress, soak, and scale. This is typically performed by the client’s team.

Persona: A persona is an archetype that creates a distilled essence from real users behaviors, goals, attitudes and needs in a concise visual format. It can be thought of as a human-like snapshot, grouping relevant and meaningful commonalities from a target user group.

Prepare: Prepare is the 2nd stage of Pega Express that describes day to day tasks during the first weeks of the project and the expected outputs – a detailed journey map, draft working software inside Pega, at least two sprints of user stories and effective Governance structures. The output is a more detailed understanding of what is to be built, sufficient to allow rules configuration to start and all the project process’ established to track and measure success.

Product Owner (PO): An empowered role that sets priorities, owns the backlog of what to build, and holds responsibility for the solution’s meeting its business objectives. The PO also represents the business and serves as a single point of contact for business decisions, sets stakeholder expectations and accepts or rejects user story completion.

Production Mirror: Production mirror is a Separate sandbox service that provides an architectural replica of the scaled production environment that can be used for production staging, scale benchmark testing, and load performance testing.

Program Sponsor Governance Meetings: Program Sponsor governance meetings address cross-program issues, resolve relationship issues, and communicate current status and priorities. They also confirm actions by all stakeholders.

Readiness Assessment: A readiness assessment is an activity to ensure the various pre-requisite processes are in place so that the project has “must-haves” ready to create a successful project environment. Readiness Assessment is held during the Discover Phase.

Security Testing/Penetration Testing: Security testing is performed to ensure the system is safe and cannot be compromised by hackers. Security testing is typically performed by either the client team or a specialist third party company at the end of an engagement, shortly before go-live.

Service Blueprint: A service blueprint is a method to visualize a customer’s end-to-end journey and the operations on the business side that are necessary to service that experience.

Show and Tell: Show and Tell session is an opportunity for the team to share the progress that they have made with the stallholders and get immediate feedback for action. Show and tells are done throughout the sprint, as well as at the end of the sprint to show all the work completed according to the Definition of Done.

Smoke Test: Smoke tests are simple tests that quickly cover a broad range of functionality to ensure that the newly deployed release has worked. These should be performed in every environment on receipt of a new deployment.

Sprint Planning: Sprint Planning is the time-boxed activity at the beginning of each sprint that identifies what will be delivered in the Increment resulting from that sprint and how the work needed to deliver that Increment will be achieved.

Sprint Retrospective: A Sprint Retrospective is a meeting held at the end of each sprint in which the whole sprint team meets to transparently discuss what went well, what can be improved and what they would like to repeat. The actions are owned by the team and reflected in the next sprint.

Sprint Review: Sprint Review is a meeting held at the end of each Sprint in which the Scrum Team and stakeholders collaborate about what was done in the Sprint. Based on that and any changes to the Product Backlog during the Sprint, attendees collaborate on the next things that could be done to optimize value.

System Architect (SA): A role that designs and builds components of Pega applications. A SA is typically someone with some programming skills but more importantly, someone who loves to build – likes to move quickly and not be tied to building lines of code. Different levels are Senior, Lead and Principle.

User Acceptance (UAT) Testing: UAT tests specific business scenarios to ensure that the system behaves as the business expects.

User Story: User Story is a short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the customer.

Vision Alignment meeting/Kick-off meeting: A Vision Alignment meeting brings the whole project together and orients them around the objectives, plan, and ways of working. This meeting should happen at the start of the Prepare phase.