Jargon

• Agile - See Wikipedia's Agile software development page.
• Alpha release - the first release, often kept in-house. Then comes the pre-production Beta release which users might profitably try unaided
• Blackbox testing - testing without knowledge of the insides of the program
• Boiler-plate - standard code
• Cleanroom software development - being extra careful
• Corncob - a troublemaker
• COTS - Commercial-off-the-shelf (not always stable - Java)
• Design by Committee - producing a product that pleases no-one. Sucessful products typically have a small design team.
• Defect Testing - looking for differences between behaviour and specification
• Firedrills - artificially created sudden deadlines
• Fuzzing - black box testing with fault injection and stress testing (e.g. sending lots of random input)
• Gold Disk - final release disk
• Golden Hammer - a mythical tool that solves all problems
• Gold-plate - extra, unnecessary features
• Greybox testing - testing with some knowledge of the insides of the program (the language it was written in, for example, or how its components interact).
• Integration testing - testing a combination of units that have already passed unit tests
• Lean - See Wikipedia's Lean software development page.
• Legacy System - an old piece of software that may be impossible to modify
• Metrics - measurable code characteristics.
• Not Invented Here Syndrome - used to be popular in Cambridge. Now replaced by 'Design by Committee'
• Oracle - something that predicts the result of a test so that results needn't be manually checked
• Regression Testing - The selective retesting of a software system that has been modified to ensure that any bugs have been fixed and that no other previously-working functions have failed as a result of the changes.
• Reinventing the Wheel - writing code that's already been written. Sometimes done to keep people busy, like whitewashing stones
• Second System Syndrome - putting into version 2 all the features suggested for version 1, resulting in feature-creep, code-bloat, etc.
• Silver Bullet - a methodology or tool that solves all problems
• Smoketest - a recompile to see if a program "smokes" (crashes)
• Spaghetti Code - messy code with GOTOs
• Stovepipe - a standalone (usually legacy) program
• Unit testing - testing the individual components
• Tiger Team - a small team to perform a single task quickly (1 or 2 people, a day/week of work)
• Validation - are we building the right product?
• Verification - are we building the product right?
• Whitebox testing - testing with knowledge of the insides of the program.