A glossary for survivors of modern software development
Agile Coach: Someone who has never shipped code telling you how to ship code faster.
Agile Transformation: Renaming your meetings and keeping everything else the same.
Architecture: The thing you'll wish you had after the third rewrite.
Backlog: A graveyard of good intentions sorted by priority.
Blocker: Something preventing you from working. Often another meeting about blockers.
Bug: A feature you didn't intend to build.
Burndown Chart: A graph that shows how far behind you are, updated daily.
Code Review: Where you discover your colleagues have different opinions about everything.
Codebase: A collection of workarounds held together by hope and deprecated dependencies.
Commit Message: A lie you tell your future self about what you just did.
Deadline: A fictional date that determines when you'll start panicking.
Definition of Done: A checklist everyone agrees to and nobody follows.
Deployment: The moment your code becomes someone else's problem.
Documentation: Something you'll write later. You won't.
Epic: A ticket too big to estimate, so you stop trying.
Estimation: The art of guessing wrong with confidence.
Feature Flag: A way to ship broken code and pretend you didn't.
Grooming: Arguing about ticket descriptions instead of building the thing.
Hotfix: A fix deployed so fast you don't have time to break anything else. Usually.
Integration: When your code meets their code and they immediately hate each other.
JIRA: Where tickets go to be forgotten.
Kanban Board: A wall of sticky notes proving you have too much work.
Knowledge Transfer: The week before someone leaves when they explain three years of context.
Legacy Code: Code that works but nobody understands, written by someone who left, that you're not allowed to touch but must somehow extend.
Merge Conflict: Git's way of reminding you that you should have communicated.
Microservices: A distributed monolith with network latency.
MVP: The smallest thing you can ship before stakeholders add 47 more requirements.
On-Call: Sleeping with your laptop open, waiting for everything to break.
Pattern: A reusable solution. See also: the thing you should have built the first time.
Performance Review: Where you justify your existence using metrics nobody understands.
Pivot: Admitting the original idea was wrong without saying so.
Planning Poker: A card game where everyone loses.
Production: Where bugs go to become everyone's problem.
Quick Fix: A permanent solution you'll regret in six months.
Refactoring: Rewriting code written by past you, who was clearly an idiot.
Retrospective: A meeting where you list problems you won't fix.
Roadmap: A work of fiction updated quarterly.
Scope Creep: When the thing you're building slowly becomes a different thing, but the deadline stays the same.
Scrum Master: A professional meeting scheduler.
Sprint: A period of time in which you run as fast as possible toward unclear goals.
Sprint Planning: Promising to do more than you can, then feeling bad when you don't.
Stakeholder: Someone who wants everything, yesterday, for free.
Standup: A meeting where everyone stands so it ends faster. It never ends faster.
Story Points: Imaginary units that mean different things to every team but are somehow used to compare teams.
Sync: A meeting that could have been a Slack message.
Tech Debt: The interest you pay on decisions made by people who no longer work here.
Technical Discovery: Time spent realizing the ticket was wrong.
10x Developer: A developer who creates ten times the work for everyone else.
TODO Comment: A message from past you that future you will ignore.
Velocity: A number that goes up when you're winning and is "not a measure of productivity" when you're losing.
Waterfall: The thing we replaced with Agile. Now we do the same thing in two-week increments.
WIP Limit: The number of tasks you're allowed to ignore at once.