Vivify Scrum uses some non-standard terminology (e.g., it does not use the term “acceptance criteria” or “definition of done” but does have “checklists”) and allows some non-standard practices (e.g., tasks can have checklists). To use standard practices and avoid any confusion, you must use the following practices and comply with the following conventions.

1. Each sprintable backlog item must be have an item type of “Story”.
2. Every sprintable backlog item must have a single checklist containing the acceptance criteria.
3. Most sprintable backlog items should have subitems.
4. Every subitem must have an item type of “Task”.
5. A task must not have a checklist. (A task should be small so a checklist would not provide any additional useful information.)
6. The team must have an assignee for every task.
7. Stories must not have assignees (since the individual tasks do).
8. The team member that is the assignee on a task must mark it as “Done” when it is completed.
9. The team must have (at least) one reviewer for every story.
10. Tasks must not have reviewers (because they will be reviewed by the reviewer for the story).
11. Epics can (and should) be included in the product backlog. Since there is no specific item type for epics, they must be classified as “Story”.
12. Since VivifyScrum does not allow multiple levels of drill-down, when an epic is decomposed into sprintable stories it must be removed from the product backlog.

Help is available on the using VivifyScrum page .