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Terminology

2185 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

All areas2185 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture89 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture81 Cost Architecture & FinOps66 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization66 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64
Kind Any concept785 practice729 pattern362 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

67 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Benefit Realisation Checkpoint Post-Implementation Benefit Review, Benefit Sign-Off Gate practice Outcome Measurement A scheduled review after go-live at which the budget holder confirms whether the claimed benefit has appeared in a named line, so that a benefit which never arrives is distinguishable from one that did.
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform case-study Business Architecture Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Build versus Buy practice Build vs Buy Whether to build a capability or acquire it — decided primarily by whether the capability differentiates, not by whether you could build it.
Business Capabilities concept Business Capabilities What the business does, expressed independently of how it does it — the most stable frame available for drawing system boundaries.
Business Capability concept Business Architecture What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
Business Case Structure practice Business Cases The argument format that gets technical investment funded — problem, options, quantified benefit, cost, risk and a recommendation.
Business Cases practice Business Cases The argument that an investment is worth making — where architects supply the cost, risk and option value rather than the enthusiasm.
Business Continuity practice Business Continuity Keeping the business operating through disruption — a broader discipline than disaster recovery, and one that includes not using the system at all.
Business Domain Boundary concept Domain Boundaries A division of the business into areas with distinct language, ownership and rates of change, used as the primary input to system and team boundaries.
Business Impact Analysis practice Business Continuity Determining which business processes must be restored, how quickly, and what the consequence of not doing so is — the input from which recovery targets are derived.
Business KPIs metric Business KPIs The measures the business runs on — which architects should understand, influence and instrument.
Business Processes concept Business Processes The sequences of activity that exercise capabilities — where handoffs, exceptions and manual steps reveal what the architecture must support.
Capability Heat Map practice Capability Mapping A capability map coloured by a chosen dimension — maturity, cost, risk, or strategic importance — to make patterns visible to non-technical stakeholders.
Capability Mapping practice Capability Mapping Laying out capabilities hierarchically and overlaying information — systems, cost, health, differentiation — to make investment decisions visible.
Capability Maturity Assessment practice Business Capabilities Rating each business capability on how well it is currently performed, so investment can be directed at the gap between importance and maturity.
Captive User Signal Mandated Tool Measurement, Workaround Count metric Product Thinking The small set of measurements that still carry information when users cannot choose an alternative - workarounds, time to first success, abandonment - because usage and satisfaction no longer do.
Cash-Releasing Benefit Hard Saving, Budget-Line Saving concept Business Cases A benefit that reduces a named budget line on a known date, as distinct from released capacity or avoided cost - which are real but do not become money until a further decision is taken.
Compensating Control practice Stakeholder Analysis A cheaper measure that reduces a risk enough to proceed, used deliberately and with an expiry, when the full control cannot be delivered in the available time.
Compliance Obligation Mapping practice Regulatory Constraints Translating regulatory text into specific, testable technical requirements attached to the systems they apply to.
Configuration Over Fork Variation as Data, Single Codebase Multi-Market, Parameterised Localisation concept Regulatory Constraints Expressing per-market or per-tenant differences as configuration data and adapters behind stable interfaces rather than as separate codebases, so that improvements ship everywhere and a new market is mostly a …
Configuration Surface Absorbing Variation by Configuration, Yes-Configured pattern Stakeholder Analysis A deliberately designed set of configurable behaviours that absorbs the customisation requests a business will predictably receive, so the answer becomes "yes, configured" rather than "yes, built".
Cost of Delay concept Portfolio Prioritisation The economic loss per unit of time that a decision or delivery is postponed, which turns prioritisation from opinion into arithmetic.
Cost of Inaction Cost of Delay, Do-Nothing Cost practice Business Cases The quantified ongoing cost of leaving a system as it is - the number that lets architectural work compete against feature work for funding.
Decision Latency Time to Architectural Decision, Decision Queue Time metric Organisational Constraints The elapsed time from a design question being raised to a decision being made, whose length changes not only when designs ship but how complicated they are - because optionality is the rational hedge against s…
Domain Boundaries from the Business practice Domain Boundaries Deriving service boundaries from the language and decisions of the business, rather than from data structure or team structure.
Effective-Dated Rules Temporal Rule Versioning, As-At Governance pattern Regulatory Constraints Storing business and regulatory rules as versioned configuration with effective dates, so a record remains governed by the rules that applied when it was created - without which every rule change requires a da…
Exception Tail Long Tail of Cases, Manual Remainder concept Business Processes The minority of cases an automated process cannot handle, whose automation cost per case rises steeply, so the economically correct end state is usually a smaller manual path rather than none.
Flow Efficiency Work-to-Wait Ratio, Process Cycle Efficiency concept Value Streams The proportion of elapsed lead time in which work is actively being done - typically very low, which is why optimising engineering throughput addresses the minority of the problem.
Fundable Boundary Budget-Aligned Boundary, Ownable Boundary concept Operating Models A service boundary that sits inside one budget line and one approver - the condition under which it survives contact with the organisation rather than being re-crossed by the first urgent change.
Guarantee Surface Promise Surface, Service Guarantee Footprint concept Product Thinking The set of customer-facing promises a product has made, each of which obliges the architecture to detect its own breach and pay for it - so this surface, not the feature count, drives a whole class of build cost.
Inverted Capability Map System-Derived Capability Model, Inventory-Shaped Capability Map concept Capability Mapping A capability map whose boundaries and names were derived from the existing system inventory, so it confirms the current implementation and cannot show that the business needs something it is not organised to do.
Keeping-the-Lights-On Baseline Run Reservation, KTLO Allocation practice Portfolio Prioritisation The share of engineering capacity that unplanned and maintenance work consumes whether or not it is planned, reserved explicitly so that roadmap commitments are achievable and the trade-off is visible.
KPI Attribution Chain Benefit Attribution Chain, Metric Causal Chain practice Business KPIs The explicit path from an architecture change through an operational metric and a short-lag product metric to the business measure finance reports - with the lag and the counterfactual named - so the benefit c…
Lead Time to Value metric Time to Market The elapsed time from identifying an opportunity to delivering measurable benefit, which is usually dominated by waiting rather than by building.
Leading and Lagging Indicator concept Business KPIs The distinction between a measure that predicts an outcome and one that confirms it after the fact, determining whether a metric can be acted on.
Manual Fallback Capacity Degraded-Mode Throughput, Paper-Process Capacity practice Business Continuity The transactions per hour a business can actually complete without its system - the measured number that says whether a recovery-time objective is survivable and how long the catch-up takes.
Operating Model concept Operating Models How an organisation arranges people, process, technology and governance to deliver its capabilities, which constrains architecture as strongly as any technical factor.
Operating Models concept Operating Models How an organisation arranges people, ownership and decision rights to deliver and run systems — which determines what architectures are viable.
Operational Readiness Go-Live Readiness, Launch Readiness practice Time to Market Defining go-live from the whole value stream rather than from the deployment, so the processes that receive a launch - returns, reconciliation, support, tax - are ready before customers arrive rather than week…
Organisational Constraints concept Organisational Constraints The structural, procedural and human limits that determine which designs can actually be built and operated here.
Organisational Readiness concept Organisational Constraints Whether an organisation has the skills, capacity, structure and appetite to operate a proposed architecture, independent of the design's technical merit.
Outcome Measurement practice Outcome Measurement Determining whether an architectural change achieved what it was meant to — the step most often skipped, which is why the same mistakes recur.
Outcome over Output concept Product Thinking Measuring and committing to changes in user or business behaviour rather than to the delivery of features.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with users, a roadmap and adoption metrics — because a platform that must be mandated is one that has not earned its use.
Platform as a Product practice Platform as a Product Running an internal platform with the disciplines of a product — voluntary adoption, user research, documentation and a roadmap — rather than as a mandated standard.
Platform Bypass Signal Adoption as Feedback, Voluntary Platform Use concept Platform as a Product Teams routing around an internal platform read as a product signal about the platform's fitness, not as a compliance failure to be solved with a mandate.
Power-Interest Grid practice Stakeholder Analysis A classification of stakeholders by their influence over a decision and their level of concern with it, used to allocate communication effort deliberately.
Process Model concept Business Processes A representation of how work actually flows through an organisation, distinguished from a capability by describing sequence, actors and handoffs.
Product Thinking concept Product Thinking Treating what you build as something with users whose problems it must solve — applied to internal platforms as much as to customer-facing products.
Protected Allocation Ring-Fenced Capacity, Non-Negotiated Investment practice Portfolio Prioritisation A fixed share of capacity reserved for a category of work that loses every individual comparison against features - because the aggregate outcome would otherwise be nobody's decision.
Regulatory Constraint concept Business Architecture A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
Regulatory Constraint as Architectural Driver concept Regulatory Constraints A compliance obligation that removes design options entirely, and therefore belongs among the first constraints identified rather than checked at the end.
Shared-Team Queue Central Team Bottleneck, Review Queue concept Operating Models The queueing behaviour of any central team that must approve or perform work for many others, where waiting time rises sharply as utilisation approaches capacity and teams begin routing around the control.
Slip Cost per Week Weekly Delay Cost, Delay Cost per Week metric Time to Market The money a launch loses for each week it is late - and whether that money is deferred or destroyed - which is the only form in which time to market can be traded against design quality.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective case-study Business Architecture The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
Stakeholder Analysis practice Stakeholder Analysis Identifying who has a stake in a decision, what each cares about, and what would make each object — before the design review rather than during it.
Strategic Sourcing Decision practice Build vs Buy A build-versus-buy decision framed around competitive differentiation and organisational capacity rather than a comparison of visible costs.
Team Interaction Mode concept Team Topologies The defined way two teams work together — collaborating, consuming a service, or facilitating — chosen deliberately and expected to change over time.
Team Topologies concept Team Topologies Four team types and three interaction modes, used deliberately to shape both the organisation and the architecture it produces.
Time to Market concept Time to Market How long from idea to customer value — an architectural property determined by coupling, batch size and the number of teams required.