Question for top grammar specialists only. Atlassian vocabulary guidance.

Jennie Rosio

Hi there—I am a tech proposal writer so my writing has to as flawless as possible. Could you please tell me when to capitalize and when to lowercase: 

• Scrum
• Kanban
• Sprint
• Agile
• Stand-up meeting
• Agile

Also how do you render these phrases?

Stand-up meeting? Stand up meeting? 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

It is more about consistency and context than hard and fast rules.  If I write one of those phrases somewhere in a page or post, then I will try to capitalise all of them, or none.  For example, I will try to stick to Scrum and Kanban when talking about boards, you will (hopefully) not find I say "Scrum" in one sentence and "kanban" in the next.

That said, all five things you have listed should normally be capitalised.  They are all the names of certain documented constructs.  Having said that, four of the five don't necessarily have to be, because the words might not be referring to the actual named concepts.

Scrum is a practice that timeboxes pieces of work, and looks for continuous improvement.  It is named from the "scrum" you get in certain ball games.  (I can't tell you if it was named from which one, but the original word is "scrummage" in Rugby).  

Kanban is the exception - it's a proper name for a methodology, derived from the Japanese (phonetics I think???) Kan = sign and Ban = board.  So that should really always be capitalised as a real name for something.

Sprints are a function of Scrum, but it's fine to describe the members of a team as "sprinting towards a goal" - you'd use the lowercase in there.  Similarly, Agile and Stand-ups - they're both concepts with distinct names, but you might describe a team or process as "agile" the same way you'd describe my cat (albeit not the clumsy one!), and a Stand-up really is a meeting where people stand up and talk!  Oh, and for "stand-up", Grammarly always suggests hyphenating it when talking about the noun form, so I go with that.  I personally prefer "Stand-up"; I think as a single item, it reads better to me, and I can drop the "meeting" from it too.

So, capitalise when you're talking about the concepts, try to be consistent, and then my third trick is to try to do the opposite of what I've done here - avoid using phrases which might have different meanings on the same page!