Glossary

Product Engineering Glossary

Technical terms explained in plain language. Built for founders, product managers, and anyone working with engineering teams.

A

Application Programming Interface — a contract that defines how different software systems communicate with each other.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment — automated pipelines that test, build, and deploy code changes reliably and repeatedly.

Systematic examination of source code by developers other than the author to identify bugs, security issues, and architectural problems.

Packaging an application with all its dependencies into a standardized unit (container) that runs consistently across any environment.

Adding more servers to handle increased load, as opposed to vertical scaling which means upgrading a single server.

Insecure Direct Object Reference — a vulnerability where changing an ID in a URL or request exposes another user's data.

Managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual console clicks.

An international standard for information security management systems (ISMS) that demonstrates an organization's commitment to data protection.

An architecture pattern where an application is built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate over APIs.

Minimum Viable Product — the simplest version of a product that can be released to validate a business hypothesis with real users.

Authorized simulated attacks on a system to identify security vulnerabilities before real attackers find them.

Restricting how many requests a user or IP address can make to your application within a given time window.

Restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior to improve readability, maintainability, and performance.

A compliance framework that verifies an organization handles customer data securely, based on five trust service criteria.

The accumulated cost of shortcuts, quick fixes, and deferred engineering decisions that make future development slower and riskier.

Building software by describing what you want to an AI coding tool and iterating on the output, without writing code manually.

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