Tauseef FayyazA to Z
Glossary
Every concept in this sheet, plus the smaller terms it uses. Select a concept to open its card.
A
- Appetite and fixed time, variable scope
- Deciding first how much time a problem is worth, then shaping a solution that fits that time, instead of estimating a fixed scope.
B
- Brooks's law
- The observation that adding people to a late software project makes it later, because new people need onboarding and communication paths multiply.
- Build versus buy
- Deciding whether to build a capability in house, use open source you operate, or pay for a managed product, based on total cost, differentiation, risk and lock-in.
C
- Choose boring technology
- The idea that an organisation can afford only a few new, unproven technologies at once, so most choices should use well-understood tools it already runs.
- Conway's law
- The observation that systems tend to mirror the communication structure of the organisation that builds them.
- Cutting scope
- Removing or deferring parts of a project, openly and in writing, so the most important part ships on time.
D
- Decision records other teams can find
- Architecture decisions written as ADRs or design docs and stored in one searchable, well-known place, with status, context, options and consequences.
F
- Failure modes and blast radius
- The ways a system can fail, such as dependency outages, overload, retry storms or bad deploys, and how much of the product each failure takes down.
M
- Milestones
- Checkpoints that each deliver something working you can demo, such as one end-to-end flow for internal users, rather than finished layers like "backend done".
P
- Project brief
- A one-page document stating the problem, why now, the time budget, goals, non-goals, owners and how success will be measured.
R
- Risks and cross-team dependencies
- A living list of what could go wrong and what you need from other teams, each with an owner, a date and a mitigation, reviewed weekly.
S
- Service and data ownership boundaries
- Clear lines saying which team owns each service, database and API, who may change it, and who gets paged when it breaks.
- SLOs and error budgets
- An SLO is a reliability target for a measured indicator, such as 99.9 percent of requests succeeding over 30 days.
T
- Technical debt as a portfolio
- Managing debt like investments: listing the main items, estimating the ongoing cost of each and the cost to fix, and paying down the ones with the best return.
W
- Weekly status update
- A short written update saying whether the project is on track, at risk or off track, why, what changed and what help is needed.