Validation Glossary

Browse 34 validation terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

34 Validation Terms

Anchor Tenant
A large foundational customer whose adoption helps justify a market, product direction, or ecosystem and can attract others. The term is borrowed from retail...
API Testing
The practice of verifying that an API behaves correctly across success paths, edge cases, failures, authentication scenarios, and contract expectations. API...
Certification
A formal process of verifying that a product, component, or system meets specific standards, requirements, or compatibility criteria defined by an external...
Config Schema
A formal definition of the expected structure, types, and constraints of configuration values. Config schemas are used to validate settings early, document...
Customer Development
A startup methodology centered on talking to customers early and often to validate problems, buyers, and product direction before scaling execution. It is...
Customer Discovery
The process of interviewing and studying potential customers to understand their problems, workflows, priorities, and willingness to pay before committing to a...
Custom Validator
Validation logic written for application-specific rules that are not fully covered by generic schema checks or framework defaults. Custom validators are common...
Defensive Coding
Writing code to guard against bad input, misuse, edge cases, and unexpected states rather than assuming everything upstream behaves perfectly. It often...
Defensive Programming
A coding approach that assumes inputs, state, and dependencies may be invalid or hostile and therefore validates, bounds, and handles errors carefully. In...
Field Test
A test conducted in real or realistic operating conditions rather than only in controlled lab or staging environments. In engineering culture field tests...
First Revenue
The first actual money a startup earns from a customer, often treated as a major proof point that someone will pay for the product. It is a milestone because...
Input Validation
Input Validation is the checking and normalization of untrusted input before it reaches logic, storage, or execution contexts. Security teams use it to enforce...
Internet Points
Likes, stars, karma, reputation, or other online signals treated as social currency. In engineering slang, internet points matter just enough to distort...
JSON Schema
A vocabulary for describing the structure, types, required fields, and constraints of JSON documents. It is used to validate payloads, generate forms or code,...
Market Fit
The degree to which a product meaningfully satisfies demand in a real market segment. Founders often use the phrase more loosely than product-market fit, but...
Market Validation
Evidence that a real market wants the product enough to adopt, pay, or materially engage with it. Market validation is stronger when it comes from behavior...
Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of a product that can still deliver value and generate learning about customers and the market. A true MVP is not just small; it is...
Model Validation
The process of verifying that a model or model-backed system behaves acceptably before or during deployment. Model validation can include benchmarks,...
OCSP
OCSP is the online certificate status protocol used to check whether a certificate has been revoked. Security teams use it to enforce trust, reduce exposure,...
Package Validate
To verify that a package meets expected requirements for structure, metadata, compatibility, or policy compliance before publication or installation. In...
Pre-Product
Describing a company that has not yet built a full product, usually because it is still validating customer needs, assembling a team, or prototyping....
Pressure Test
To test an idea, system, or plan under tougher conditions to see whether it holds up. In engineering slang, pressure testing is what separates plausible from...
Product Discovery
The process of learning what product to build and why through customer research, experiments, and validation before committing heavily to implementation. Good...
Product-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies strong market demand — users actively seek it out, retention is high, and growth becomes organic. Marc Andreessen's...
Proof of Concept
Proof of Concept (PoC) is a small-scale implementation or demonstration built to verify that a particular idea, technology, or approach is feasible and worth...
Proving Ground
A context, customer segment, or early market where a company can test whether its product and execution hold up under real conditions. Startups often use one...
Rapid Prototype
A quickly built early version of something meant to validate an idea, workflow, or technical assumption rather than serve as the final system. It prioritizes...
Request Validation
The checking of incoming requests to ensure parameters, headers, bodies, methods, and other fields are well-formed, authorized, and safe for the intended...
Runtime Type Check
A type verification performed during program execution rather than at compile time, using mechanisms like Java's instanceof, Python's isinstance(), or...
Seed Stage
The earliest institutional startup stage, when product, market, and go-to-market assumptions are still being validated. Seed-stage companies usually have high...
Traction
Evidence that a company is gaining real momentum, such as revenue growth, usage, retention, customer demand, or other signs the market is pulling the product....
Validation Loss
The loss measured on validation data rather than on training data, used to assess generalization during model development. Rising validation loss can signal...
Validation Metric
A metric calculated on validation data to assess whether a model is improving in the ways that matter for the task. Validation metrics help teams decide when...
Zod
A TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library that lets developers define a schema once and automatically infer the corresponding TypeScript...

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