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Terminology

2240 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 areas2240 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience80 Observability75 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture74 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture71 Data Platform Architecture69 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics74 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk69
Kind Any concept806 practice738 pattern379 metric133 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

71 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Accessibility Testing a11y Testing, WCAG Testing practice Accessibility Testing Verifying that an interface is usable by people with disabilities, through automated checks, assistive technology testing and structural review.
Accessible Component Contract Component Accessibility Contract, Design System Accessibility Guarantee pattern Accessibility Testing A published, tested statement of a shared component's keyboard model, roles, names and announced states, so that accessibility is verified once where the component is built rather than re-audited in every prod…
Anomaly Retention Keep the Weird Records, Realistic Test Data practice Test Data Management Preserving the malformed, historical and hand-fixed records when producing test data - because they are precisely what breaks migrations and new code paths, and a sanitising process removes exactly what made t…
Arrival Rate Model concept Performance Test Design Driving a load test by requests arriving per second regardless of how the system responds, rather than by a fixed number of virtual users.
Assertion Strength What Coverage Does Not Measure, Mutation Score concept Mutation Testing Whether a test would actually fail if the code were wrong - which coverage does not measure and mutation testing does, and which explains defects in fully-covered code.
Automated Accessibility Coverage metric Accessibility Testing The proportion of accessibility criteria a tool can decide mechanically — around a third — and the explicit acknowledgement that the rest needs people.
Can-I-Deploy Gate Deployment Compatibility Query, Contract Broker Gate practice Contract Testing at Scale A check at deploy time that asks whether this service version is verified against the consumer and provider versions actually running in the target environment - turning contract tests from documentation into …
Change Failure Rate metric Quality Gates The proportion of deployments to production that cause a degradation requiring remediation.
Chaos Experiment practice Chaos as a Test A controlled fault injected into a system to test a written hypothesis about how it should degrade.
Chaos Experiment Yield Findings per Engineer-Week, Resilience Discovery Rate metric Chaos as a Test New findings per unit of resilience-engineering effort - the number that separates a chaos programme's decaying discovery value from its cheap and permanent regression value, and decides which half to fund.
Composition Accessibility Defect Assembled-Page Accessibility Defect, Integration-Level A11y Failure concept Accessibility Testing An accessibility failure that exists only in the assembled page - focus order, landmark duplication, heading structure, announcement rate - and that every individually conformant component can pass its own che…
Configuration Corpus Parity Input Corpus Parity, Config Space Coverage concept Environment Parity How closely the set of configurations a pre-production environment exercises resembles the set production actually carries - the parity dimension that decides whether a config-triggered latent bug is found by …
Consumer Contract concept Consumer-Driven Contracts A machine-readable record of exactly which parts of a provider's response one consumer relies on, generated from that consumer's own tests.
Consumer-Driven Contract CDC, Pact Testing pattern Consumer-Driven Contracts A machine-checkable expectation written by the consumer of an API and verified against the provider's build, catching integration breaks without a shared environment.
Content-Channel Release Path Data Channel Deployment, Ungated Update Path concept Quality Gates Any route by which an artefact reaches a running system without passing the gates that code passes - remote config, feature flags, rules tables, models, CDN rules, detection content - and which therefore carri…
Contract Coverage Gap Contract Blind Spot, Unasserted Field Surface metric Consumer-Driven Contracts The share of a provider's response that a consumer's code reads but its contract never asserts on - the exact surface a provider can delete while every contract check stays green.
Contract Testing at Scale practice Contract Testing at Scale Operating consumer-driven contracts across hundreds of services, where the broker, versioning and deployment checks become the hard part.
Contract Verification Gate practice Contract Testing at Scale A provider's pipeline stage that replays every consumer's recorded expectations and fails the build if any would break.
Definition of Done practice Quality Gates The agreed, explicit conditions under which work is finished, which functions as a quality gate only when it is automated and non-negotiable.
Deployed-Artefact Assertion Fleet Version Assertion, Release State Check practice Testing in Production A check run after every deployment that compares the build identifier reported by each running host against the intended release, so a partially applied deployment fails loudly instead of running two behaviour…
Deployment Compatibility Check Can-I-Deploy, Deployment Gate on Contracts practice Contract Testing at Scale A pre-deployment query asking whether this version is compatible with everything currently deployed - which turns contract tests from a test into a release gate.
Diagnostic Radius Failure Blast Radius, Signal Narrowness concept Test Pyramid Shapes The number of distinct causes consistent with a test's failure - the property that actually separates the layers of a test suite and decides what a red build costs to investigate.
Emergent Failure Scale-Dependent Failure, Threshold Failure, Non-Linear Breakage concept Performance Test Design A failure that exists only above a particular absolute scale because it depends on a fixed threshold rather than a ratio - which is why scaled-down environments validate code and not capacity.
End-to-End Test Cost Curve concept End-to-End Test Economics How the cost of a broad end-to-end suite grows with its size while its marginal value falls, and where the two cross.
End-to-End Test Economics concept End-to-End Test Economics The compounding maths that makes large end-to-end suites unaffordable and untrustworthy at scale.
Environment Parity concept Environment Parity How closely a pre-production environment reproduces the properties of production that actually cause failures.
Fake Drift Virtualisation Divergence, Stale Mock concept Service Virtualisation The divergence between a simulated dependency and the real one it stands in for - which makes tests pass while the real integration fails, producing confidence rather than caution.
Flake Budget Flakiness Threshold, Quarantine Policy practice Flaky Test Management A hard limit on test flakiness, enforced by automatic detection and quarantine with a deletion deadline - because above a small rate the suite stops being a signal and starts training the team to ignore failures.
Flake Rate Test Nondeterminism, Suite Trust Threshold, Intermittent Failure Rate concept Flaky Test Management The proportion of test failures that are not caused by a real defect - a quantity with a sharp threshold, above which the suite stops being a signal and starts training the team to ignore failures.
Flaky Test concept Flaky Test Management A test that passes and fails on unchanged code, destroying the signal value of the entire suite it belongs to.
Flip Rate Test Flip Ratio, Status Change Rate metric Flaky Test Management The ratio of a test's pass-to-fail and fail-to-pass transitions to its total invocations, which identifies flakiness from history the CI system already holds rather than from anyone's judgement about which tes…
Full-Link Stress Test Full-Chain Load Test, Production Rehearsal practice Performance Test Design A load test generated against the production environment across the entire request path including shared dependencies and third parties, isolated by a propagated traffic marker so synthetic writes never touch …
Integration Test Boundary concept Integration Test Boundaries The deliberate choice of what a test includes and what it stubs, which determines both what the test can detect and what it costs.
Mutation Scope Selection Incremental Mutation Analysis, Diff-Scoped Mutation Testing practice Mutation Testing Restricting mutation analysis to the lines a change touches and to code whose failure is expensive, so a technique that costs one to two orders of magnitude more than the test suite still fits inside a pull-re…
Mutation Score metric Mutation Testing The proportion of deliberately introduced faults that the test suite detects — a measure of whether tests would notice a defect, unlike coverage.
Mutation Testing tool Mutation Testing Deliberately introducing small faults into the code and measuring how many the test suite detects, as a measure of test strength rather than test reach.
Non-Functional Acceptance practice Non-Functional Test Strategy Treating quality-attribute targets as acceptance criteria with automated verification, so a release can fail on latency the way it fails on a broken feature.
Non-Functional Test Strategy practice Non-Functional Test Strategy The plan for how each quality attribute claim will be demonstrated, tying every NFR to a test that could falsify it.
Performance Test Design practice Performance Test Design Constructing a load test whose result predicts production behaviour rather than merely producing numbers.
Production Parity Gap concept Environment Parity The enumerated list of ways a pre-production environment differs from production, which is the list of defect classes it cannot catch.
Property-Based Testing Generative Testing, QuickCheck-Style Testing tool Test Architecture Strategy Asserting invariants that must hold for all inputs, then having the framework generate many inputs to try to break them.
Provenance Parity History Parity, Build-Path Parity concept Environment Parity Similarity between environments in how they were built and changed over time - the parity dimension that decides whether a rehearsal transfers, and the one that manifests and version numbers cannot show.
Quality and Testing Strategy practice Testing & Quality Architecture How an organisation obtains confidence that changes are safe — a portfolio decision about where to spend limited verification effort.
Quality Gate Threshold practice Quality Gates The specific numeric bar a change must clear, and the perverse incentives it creates when chosen carelessly.
Recorded Interaction Corpus Traffic-Recorded Fixtures, Captured Interaction Set practice Service Virtualisation A set of real request and response pairs captured from a live dependency and used to build and continuously re-verify its stand-in, so the fake reproduces evidence rather than the author's assumptions.
Referentially Consistent Subset Database Subsetting, Coherent Test Slice practice Test Data Management A small extract of a production-shaped database in which every referenced row is present, so a test suite runs against realistic structure at a size that fits an ephemeral per-change environment.
Security Testing in the Pipeline Shift-Left Security, SAST/DAST/SCA practice Security Testing in the Pipeline Automated security analysis embedded in the build, chosen and tuned so that findings are actionable rather than overwhelming.
Service Stub Fidelity concept Service Virtualisation How faithfully a stand-in dependency reproduces the real one's behaviour — including its errors, latency and limits — which bounds what testing against it proves.
Service Virtualisation API Simulation, Mock Server tool Service Virtualisation A stand-in for a real dependency that responds with realistic data, latency and error behaviour, so a service can be tested without it.
Shift-Left Security practice Security Testing in the Pipeline Moving security checks earlier so findings arrive while the author still has context, on the condition that the signal-to-noise ratio justifies it.
Side-Effect Isolation Synthetic Traffic Containment, Shadow Write Isolation, Test Traffic Tagging practice Testing in Production Ensuring that test, synthetic or shadowed traffic in production cannot produce real-world effects - the control that separates professional production testing from an incident caused deliberately.
Steady-State Hypothesis concept Chaos as a Test The measurable statement of normal behaviour that a chaos experiment predicts will hold while a fault is injected, without which the exercise is not a test.
Synthetic Data tool Synthetic Data Artificially generated data that preserves the statistical and structural properties of real data without containing anyone's actual records.
Synthetic Data Fidelity concept Synthetic Data How closely generated data reproduces the shape, distribution and awkwardness of the real thing, which decides what the data can validly be used for.
Synthetic Monitoring practice Testing in Production Continuously executing a real user journey against production from outside it, so a broken journey is detected before a user reports it.
Test Architecture Strategy practice Test Architecture Strategy A written decision about which risks are covered by which kind of test, at what scope, run at what point, and which risks are accepted.
Test Data Management practice Test Data Management The problem of getting data that is realistic enough to find defects and safe enough to exist outside production.
Test Data Provisioning practice Test Data Management Getting each test the data it needs, in a state it can rely on, without copying production personal data into a weaker environment.
Test Double Stub, Mock, Fake, Spy concept Service Virtualisation Any stand-in for a real collaborator in a test - and the five kinds differ in what they let you assert, which is why using the wrong one produces tests that break on refactoring or pass while the code is wrong.
Test Double Boundary concept Integration Test Boundaries The line inside a test between what is real and what is substituted, which determines exactly what the test can and cannot prove.