Vertical slice

A vertical slice, sometimes abbreviated to VS, is a type of milestone, benchmark, or deadline, with emphasis on demonstrating progress across all components of a project . It could be considered a project management buzzword, and may have originated in the games industry.

The term 'vertical slice' refers to a cross-sectional slice through the layers that form the structure of the software code base. It is mostly used in Scrum terminology where the work is planned in terms of features (or stories). For example as a very basic approach, a software project may consist of three layers (or components): Data access layer (bottom), Business logic layer (middle) and User interface Layer (top). In this very common approach, a vertical slice means a bit of every layer. Again as an example, a new feature request like 'showing x information on main screen' would contain these work bits: