Tech Workplace Dictionary

The expectation that a person or team explains and answers for an agreed outcome.

A specific follow-up task assigned to an owner with an expected outcome.

A concise record of an important architecture decision and the reasons behind it.

A shared understanding of goals facts decisions roles and next actions.

The amount of time attention or working capacity a person or team has available.

Spending disproportionate time debating a simple issue while avoiding harder decisions.

The scope of systems users or functionality that could be affected by a failure or change.

An issue that prevents meaningful progress on a task or outcome.

To attempt an unnecessarily broad or nearly impossible scope all at once.

Work performed within or around an existing system and its constraints.

The rate at which a company spends cash over a period usually stated monthly.

The number of people whose loss would seriously threaten a project's continuity.

Active support or commitment from people needed to make a decision succeed.

To return to a topic or contact someone again at a later time.

A structured examination of a code change by someone other than its author.

The degree to which responsibilities within a component belong together.

The degree to which one component depends on knowledge or behavior of another.

Something a task system or team relies on to complete its work.

A system whose components coordinate across multiple networked computers.

To examine a point in greater detail.

The one person primarily accountable for moving a specific outcome forward.

A manager responsible for the health effectiveness and delivery environment of an engineering team.

A system's ability to continue operating when some components fail.

The recommended supported way to complete a common engineering task.

A project built without significant constraints from an existing implementation.

A fixed time when someone must leave or an activity must end.

The principle of granting only the access needed for a task and no more.

A quantitative measure used to monitor behavior performance or progress.

An architecture that divides a system into independently deployable services around capabilities.

An application whose major capabilities are deployed as one integrated unit.

The average operating time between one failure and the next.

The average time needed to restore service after a failure.

A recurring private meeting between two people often a manager and direct report.

A decision that is difficult expensive or impossible to reverse.

Responsibility for driving an outcome including decisions follow-through and communication.

A well-supported technical path that makes preferred practices easier to adopt.

A reusable strategy and set of actions for handling a broader situation.

A retrospective document or meeting that records an incident's impact causes response and follow-up actions.

The relative importance and order assigned to work when resources are limited.

A required set of checks or criteria that must pass before work advances to the next stage.

A change that can deliver a visible useful result in a short time.

A structured investigation into the underlying conditions that produced an unwanted outcome.

A change to internal code structure that preserves its intended external behavior.

A document that proposes a substantial change and invites review before a decision.

Reverting a deployment or change to a previously known state.

The target maximum time for restoring a service after disruption.

The estimated time a company can continue operating before available cash runs out.

Uncontrolled expansion of work after a project begins without corresponding tradeoffs.

To reduce the amount of work while preserving the most important outcome.

A component whose failure can stop an entire critical system or workflow.

A meeting between an employee and a manager above their direct manager.

To share an idea with relevant people early enough to gather feedback and build understanding.

A person or group affected by a decision or able to influence its outcome.

To continue a discussion outside the current meeting thread or audience.

The future cost created when a team chooses a faster or simpler technical solution today.

A testing model favoring many fast focused tests and fewer broad end-to-end tests.

A structured description of assets attackers trust boundaries threats and mitigations for a system.

Manual repetitive operational work that scales with service growth and creates little lasting value.

A decision that can be reversed at acceptable cost after learning from the outcome.

A weakness that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality integrity or availability.

A request to make the desired outcome or quality standard concrete.

The amount and mix of work assigned to a person team or system.

A chain of seemingly necessary side tasks that delays the original task.

A security approach that continuously verifies access instead of trusting requests based only on network location.