Glossary · 24 terms

Eng management

Teams, delivery, planning and reliability.

Beginner · Students and graduates

Standup: A brief team check-in, often 15 minutes: what moved, what’s next, and what’s blocked. Detail goes to follow-ups.
Sprint: In Scrum, a short iteration with a goal. The team plans at the start and reviews and reflects at the end. Docs
Backlog: All candidate work, ordered by value. The top is refined and ready; the bottom can stay rough.
Retro: A retrospective looks back at a sprint or project: what went well, what didn’t, and one or two changes to try.
Kanban: A flow-based method that visualises work and limits work in progress, so items finish before new ones start.
Roadmap: A view of priorities over time. Good roadmaps show outcomes and confidence, not promised dates for every feature.
One-on-one: A recurring 1:1 that belongs to the report: feedback, growth, concerns and context, not just status updates.
Mentor: Someone who shares advice and perspective. Mentoring is about growth; it’s different from managing someone’s work.

Velocity: A planning aid based on completed estimates. It helps a team forecast its own work, and is misused when compared across teams.
OKR: Objectives and Key Results: an inspiring objective with a few measurable outcomes that show whether it was reached.
Tech debt: Design or code choices that speed things up now but make later changes slower. It should be tracked and paid down deliberately.
Estimate: A forecast with uncertainty, in story points or time. Ranges and assumptions make estimates more honest.
RACI: A responsibility matrix that clears up who does the work, who owns the decision, who gives input and who just needs to know.
Postmortem: A review of an outage or failure: timeline, impact, causes and follow-up actions, focused on systems not blame. Docs
Delegate: Giving someone a task along with the authority and context to do it, then supporting rather than micromanaging.
Scope: The agreed boundaries of the work. Scope creep is when requirements grow without time or people growing with them.

DORA: Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service, from the DORA research program. Docs
Bus factor: The number of team members who hold critical knowledge. A bus factor of one is a risk to fix with docs and pairing.
Headcount: Budgeted positions. Planning headcount means deciding which roles unlock the most impact next.
Calibrate: Calibration sessions compare performance assessments across teams to keep standards consistent and reduce bias.
Skip-level: A conversation that skips a layer of the org chart, giving leaders direct signal and reports a wider view.
Conway: Conway’s law: organisations design systems that copy their communication structure, so team design shapes architecture.
SLO: A service level objective sets a measurable goal for an SLI. The gap to 100% is the error budget a team can spend. Docs
Blameless: Blameless reviews assume people acted reasonably with what they knew, so the team learns what in the system let it happen.