Quality Glossary

Browse 61 quality terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

61 Quality Terms

Acceptance Testing
Acceptance Testing is a quality, testing, or engineering-practice concept used to validate software behavior. It is commonly used for maintaining reliability...
AI Evaluation
The process of measuring an AI system's performance, reliability, safety, and usefulness using benchmarks, real tasks, test sets, rubrics, or human review. AI...
AI Quality
The overall usefulness and reliability of an AI system's outputs for the intended task, considering factors like correctness, consistency, tone, safety, and...
AI Test
A single test case or evaluation scenario used to check whether an AI system behaves acceptably on a specific input or requirement. AI tests can cover...
Assertion
Assertion is a quality, testing, or engineering-practice concept used to validate software behavior. It is commonly used for maintaining reliability as systems...
Automated Testing
The use of scripts and test frameworks to run checks on code behavior automatically rather than relying only on manual verification. Automated testing enables...
BDD
BDD is behavior-driven development, a testing and collaboration style centered on executable behavior examples. It is commonly used for turning user scenarios...
Benchmark Suite
Benchmark Suite is a quality, testing, or engineering-practice concept used to validate software behavior. It is commonly used for maintaining reliability as...
Breakpoint
Breakpoint is a quality, testing, or engineering-practice concept used to validate software behavior. It is commonly used for maintaining reliability as...
Bug
An error, flaw, or unintended behavior in software that causes it to produce incorrect results or behave unexpectedly — famously named after a literal moth...
Bug Severity
The seriousness of a bug's impact on correctness, stability, security, or user experience. Bug severity is about how bad the issue is when it happens, which is...
Code as Craft
A view of software development as a skilled craft shaped by discipline, repetition, care, and continuous improvement rather than only abstract engineering...
Code Coverage
A metric that measures the percentage of source code executed during automated testing. While high coverage does not guarantee correctness, low coverage...
Code Craft
The skill and care involved in writing maintainable, thoughtful, well-structured code. In developer culture, code craft emphasizes practice, standards, and...
Code Excellence
A culture or aspiration centered on high standards for code quality, design, readability, testing, and long-term maintainability. The phrase can be inspiring,...
Code Fragrance
A playful cousin of code smell, used when something feels suspicious or slightly off even if it is not yet obviously broken. In engineering slang, code...
Code Pride
A sense of ownership and satisfaction in writing solid, thoughtful, well-maintained code. In healthy teams code pride motivates quality; in unhealthy ones it...
Code Quality
The overall standard of a codebase in terms of readability, correctness, testability, maintainability, and adherence to team conventions. Code quality is not...
Code Quality Culture
The shared habits and values a team has around maintaining high code quality through reviews, tests, cleanup, standards, and disciplined changes. Strong code...
Code Review
Code Review is the systematic examination of source code by one or more developers other than the author, aimed at finding bugs, improving code quality,...
Code Review Bot
Code Review Bot is a quality, testing, or engineering-practice concept used to validate software behavior. It is commonly used for maintaining reliability as...
Code Testing Culture
The shared norms and expectations a team has around writing, maintaining, and trusting tests. Strong code testing culture means tests are part of everyday...
Data Quality
The degree to which data is accurate, complete, relevant, consistent, and usable for a specific AI task. Poor data quality often causes more serious problems...
Deadline Driven Development
A mode of software work where a fixed date dominates tradeoffs, often pushing scope cuts or quality compromises.
Definition of Done
A shared, explicit checklist of criteria that must be met before a work item is considered complete. Typically includes: code reviewed, tests passing,...
Durable Growth
Growth that is likely to persist because it is supported by strong retention, healthy economics, and repeatable demand rather than one-time spikes or...
End-to-End Test
An End-to-End Test is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Engineering Excellence
A phrase used to describe very high standards in engineering quality, reliability, design, and operational discipline. It is meaningful only when backed by...
Engineering Standards
Defined expectations for how engineering work should be done, covering areas such as testing, documentation, reviews, security, and operations. In culture,...
Excellence
A commitment to doing work at a high standard rather than settling for merely adequate output when the stakes justify better. In workplace culture, excellence...
Five Whys
A root cause analysis technique where you ask 'why?' five times to drill past symptoms to underlying causes. Originally from Toyota's production system. Works...
Good Enough
Adequate for the actual need even if not perfect by every possible standard. In engineering culture, recognizing when something is good enough is a mark of...
Integration Test
Integration Test is an automated test that verifies the interaction between two or more components, modules, or services to ensure they work correctly...
Linus's Law
Linus's Law is the observation that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, meaning that with a sufficiently large number of reviewers and testers,...
Model Quality
The overall usefulness and reliability of a model's outputs for the intended task, considering correctness, consistency, safety, and user acceptance. Model...
Mutation Testing
A technique that evaluates test suite quality by introducing small changes ('mutations') to the source code — flipping operators, changing constants, removing...
Operational Excellence
A discipline of running the business with high consistency, efficiency, reliability, and accountability. In startups, operational excellence often becomes the...
Patch Review
The process of examining a proposed code change for correctness, style, compatibility, and maintainability before it is accepted. In many open source projects,...
Peer Review
Evaluation of work by colleagues with relevant expertise before it is accepted, published, or shipped. In software teams, peer review commonly means code...
Pre-commit Hook
A Git hook script that runs automatically before a commit is created. Commonly used to run linters, formatters, type checkers, and secret scanners on staged...
Production Ready
Good enough to run for real users under real operational conditions, with acceptable reliability, observability, security, and support characteristics. Teams...
Property-Based Testing
A testing approach where you define properties that should always hold true (invariants), and the framework generates hundreds of random inputs to try to find...
Quality Filter
A filter or validation step that screens AI outputs for quality criteria such as correctness, completeness, formatting, or groundedness before they are...
Regression in AI
A deterioration in AI system behavior after a change such as a new model, prompt, index, or configuration update. AI regressions may appear as lower quality,...
Release Checklist
A documented sequence of tasks required to ship a release, such as verifying tests, updating changelogs, tagging versions, checking signatures, and...
Response Quality
The overall usefulness, correctness, clarity, and appropriateness of an AI response for a given task. Response quality is often judged by a mix of human...
Retrieval Quality
How well a retrieval system finds the right information for a given query, considering relevance, freshness, completeness, and ranking order. Retrieval quality...
Shift Left
Moving activities (testing, security scanning, performance validation) earlier in the development lifecycle — from production leftward to development. Finding...
Slop AI
A dismissive term for low-quality, generic, or spammy AI-generated output that feels cheap, repetitive, or careless.
Software Malpractice
A sarcastic label for engineering decisions so careless that they feel professionally negligent. In engineering slang, it is used when avoidable shortcuts...
Stop the Line
To halt work, release, or throughput because continuing would be unsafe or irresponsible. In engineering slang, stopping the line means treating quality or...
Sunlight Test
An informal check of whether a decision, design, or behavior would still seem acceptable if exposed to public or wider internal scrutiny. The metaphor comes...
Test Coverage
A metric — typically expressed as a percentage — that measures how much of a codebase's lines, branches, functions, or statements are exercised by the test...
Test-Driven Development
A software development methodology where you write a failing test before writing the production code that makes it pass. The cycle is red (fail), green (pass),...
Testing
The practice of verifying that software behaves as expected through automated or manual checks. Encompasses unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests,...
Testing Standard
A standard or shared convention describing how tests should be written, organized, named, or enforced. In engineering organizations, testing standards reduce...
The Joel Test
A 12-question checklist created by Joel Spolsky to quickly assess the maturity of a software team, covering basics like version control, bug databases,...
Unit Test
Unit Test is an automated test that verifies the behavior of a small, isolated piece of code, typically a single function, method, or class, in isolation from...
Unit Testing
Unit testing is the practice of writing automated tests that verify individual functions, methods, or classes in isolation from the rest of the system. Each...
Verification AI
AI systems or components used to verify claims, outputs, reasoning, or evidence rather than only generate new content. Verification AI is often used to reduce...
Zero Bug Policy
A policy or aspiration that no known bugs should remain open at a certain release stage, or that defects must be fixed rather than indefinitely tolerated....

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