Technology & AI Glossary.
40+ terms defined with rich explanations, practical FAQs, and links to free diagnostic tools.
Technical debt, AI economics, SaaS metrics, product management, and engineering leadership — explained.
Technical Debt & Code Quality
Technical Debt
Technical debt is the implied cost of future rework caused by choosing an expedient solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer. First coin...
Legacy Code
Legacy code is existing software that is difficult to modify, extend, or replace, typically because it was written with older technologies, lacks documentation,...
Refactoring
Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior. The goal is to improve the code's internal structure — readabi...
Code Smell
A code smell is a surface-level indicator in source code that suggests a deeper problem. The term was popularized by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck. Code smells ar...
DORA Metrics
DORA metrics are four key software delivery performance metrics identified by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google. They are the industry st...
Monolith to Microservices
Monolith to microservices migration is the process of breaking a single, large application (monolith) into smaller, independent services (microservices) that co...
AI & Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence by computer systems. AI encompasses machine learning, natural language processing, computer visi...
Large Language Model (LLM)
A Large Language Model is a type of artificial intelligence trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human language. LLMs like GPT-4, Cla...
AI Hallucination
An AI hallucination occurs when an artificial intelligence system generates output that is confident, fluent, and completely wrong. LLMs hallucinate because the...
Agentic AI
Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can autonomously plan, reason, and take actions to achieve goals with minimal human oversight. Unlike ...
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting inputs (prompts) to AI language models to elicit desired outputs. It encompasses techniques like few-shot learnin...
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI architecture pattern that combines a language model with a knowledge retrieval system. Instead of relying solely o...
AI Governance
AI governance is the framework of policies, processes, and controls that guide how an organization develops, deploys, and monitors artificial intelligence syste...
Vibe Coding
Vibe coding is a term that emerged in 2025-2026 to describe the practice of using AI to generate code through natural language prompts rather than writing code ...
SaaS Metrics & Finance
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the annualized value of recurring subscription revenue. It's the single most important metric for SaaS businesses and is calcu...
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the predictable, recurring revenue a SaaS business earns each month from its subscription customers. MRR is the building bloc...
Churn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue lost over a given period. Customer churn (logo churn) measures the percentage of customers who cancel. Reve...
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Net Revenue Retention (NRR), also called Net Dollar Retention (NDR), measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period...
Rule of 40
The Rule of 40 is a SaaS benchmark that states a healthy software company's combined revenue growth rate and profit margin should equal or exceed 40%. For examp...
SaaS Valuation
SaaS valuation is the process of determining the economic value of a software-as-a-service business. SaaS companies are typically valued as a multiple of their ...
Unit Economics
Unit economics measures the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business unit — typically a customer, transaction, or product unit. In SaaS, ...
Burn Rate & Runway
Burn rate is the rate at which a company is spending its cash reserves. Monthly burn rate = total monthly expenses minus total monthly revenue. Runway is how ma...
Product Management
Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit (PMF) is the degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Marc Andreessen defined it as 'being in a good market with a product t...
RICE Framework
RICE is a prioritization framework used by product managers to score and rank product ideas. RICE stands for Reach (how many people will this impact?), Impact (...
North Star Metric
A North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. It serves as the primary measure of product succe...
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a product strategy framework that focuses on the underlying 'job' a customer is trying to accomplish rather than the customer's demogr...
Kano Model
The Kano Model is a product development framework that categorizes features based on how they affect customer satisfaction. Developed by Professor Noriaki Kano,...
Engineering Management
Engineering Productivity
Engineering productivity measures how effectively a software engineering team converts resources (time, people, money) into valuable software output. It's one o...
Revenue Per Engineer
Revenue Per Engineer is a financial efficiency metric that divides a company's total revenue by the number of engineers. It measures how effectively an engineer...
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and cultural philosophies that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifec...
CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
CI/CD is a software development practice that automates the process of integrating code changes (CI) and delivering them to production (CD). Continuous Integra...
Leadership & Governance
Fractional CTO
A Fractional CTO is an experienced technology executive who provides part-time CTO services to companies that need senior technology leadership but can't justif...
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is the process of integrating digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value ...
Richard Ewing Frameworks
Technical Insolvency Date
The Technical Insolvency Date (TID) is a framework coined by Richard Ewing that identifies the specific future quarter when an organization's technical debt mai...
Innovation Tax
The Innovation Tax is a framework coined by Richard Ewing that measures the hidden cost of maintenance work that gets reported as innovation investment. It is O...
Cost of Predictivity
The Cost of Predictivity is a framework coined by Richard Ewing that measures the variable cost of AI accuracy. Unlike traditional software with near-zero margi...
Kill Switch Protocol
The Kill Switch Protocol is a framework coined by Richard Ewing for identifying and deprecating 'Zombie Features' — code that requires ongoing maintenance but g...
Feature Bloat Calculus
Feature Bloat Calculus is a framework coined by Richard Ewing for determining when a feature's maintenance cost exceeds its value contribution. It quantifies th...
Audit Interview
The Audit Interview is a hiring protocol coined by Richard Ewing that tests verification skills instead of code generation skills. Candidates are given AI-gener...
Product Economist
A Product Economist is a role and methodology coined by Richard Ewing that treats product decisions as economic decisions. Instead of measuring velocity, story ...