Glossary
Software Development Glossary
The terms that come up when you scope a web app, a mobile app, or an AI feature — explained in plain English, without the jargon. Each definition is a quick, accurate answer so you can talk to your development team with confidence.
General concepts
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- An MVP is the smallest version of a product that delivers real value to users and lets you validate the core idea with paying or active customers. It deliberately ships one or two core features instead of a full feature set, so you learn what the market actually wants before spending the full budget. We treat MVP scope as a tool for de-risking, not a way to ship something unfinished — see our MVP development service.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
- SaaS is software delivered over the internet on a subscription basis, where the provider hosts, updates, and maintains the application so customers never install or manage it themselves. Think Slack, Notion, or any tool you log into in a browser and pay for monthly. Most products we build for startups are SaaS, combining a web app, a billing system, and a multi-tenant backend.
PoC (Proof of Concept)
- A proof of concept is a small, throwaway build whose only goal is to prove that a specific technical approach actually works — for example, that a model can extract the data you need or that an integration is feasible. Unlike an MVP, a PoC is not meant for real users; it answers one risky question fast, then is usually discarded.
Technical debt
- Technical debt is the future cost of choosing a fast or easy solution now instead of a more robust one — like financial debt, it accrues "interest" as quick fixes make later changes slower and riskier. Some technical debt is a deliberate, sensible trade-off to hit a deadline; the danger is debt that is never paid down. Reducing it is a core part of ongoing software maintenance.
Agile
- Agile is an iterative approach to building software in short cycles, where working software is delivered frequently and requirements are refined as you learn, rather than fixed up front in a single big plan. In practice it means regular demos, small releases, and the ability to change priorities between cycles without restarting the project.
Sprint
- A sprint is a fixed time box — usually one or two weeks — during which an Agile team commits to completing an agreed set of work and ends with a reviewable result. Sprints give a project a steady rhythm: you see tangible progress at the close of every sprint instead of waiting months for one big delivery.
Web development
SSR (Server-Side Rendering)
- Server-side rendering means the server builds the full HTML for a page before sending it to the browser, so users and search engines receive ready-to-read content on the first request. It improves perceived speed and SEO compared with rendering everything in the browser, which is why modern frameworks like Next.js use it by default for web app development.
SPA (Single-Page Application)
- A single-page application loads one HTML page and then updates content dynamically with JavaScript as you navigate, instead of fetching a new page from the server on every click. This makes interactions feel fast and app-like, but pure SPAs can need extra work for SEO and initial load — which is why many teams pair them with server-side rendering.
PWA (Progressive Web App)
- A progressive web app is a website built to behave like a native app — it can be installed to a home screen, work offline, and send push notifications, all from a regular browser without an app store. PWAs are a cost-effective option when you want an app-like experience on every device without maintaining separate iOS and Android builds.
API (Application Programming Interface)
- An API is a defined set of endpoints and rules that lets one piece of software request data or actions from another in a predictable way. APIs are how your app talks to a payment provider, a maps service, or your own backend — and a clean, well-documented API is what makes a product easy to extend and integrate later.
Headless CMS
- A headless CMS is a content management system that stores and serves content through an API, with no built-in front end of its own — your developers render that content in whatever framework or device they choose. It decouples editing from presentation, so the same content can power a website, a mobile app, and a kiosk at once. Compare the trade-offs in our Next.js vs WordPress comparison.
Mobile development
Native app
- A native app is built specifically for one platform using its own language and tools — Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android — giving it the deepest access to device features and the most polished platform feel. The trade-off is cost: a fully native strategy usually means building and maintaining two separate codebases, which we weigh in Flutter vs native.
Cross-platform development
- Cross-platform development means writing one codebase that runs on both iOS and Android (and often web), instead of building each app separately. It typically cuts cost and time to market significantly while still producing real app-store apps — the main question is which framework fits your product, which we cover in React Native vs Flutter.
Flutter
- Flutter is Google's open-source framework for building cross-platform apps from a single codebase, rendering its own UI for consistent design and high performance across iOS, Android, web, and desktop. It is our go-to for mobile app development when a client wants one team to ship to every platform without sacrificing the native feel.
AI & machine learning
LLM (Large Language Model)
- A large language model is an AI system trained on huge amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language, powering tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. In products, an LLM is the engine behind chatbots, drafting and summarisation features, and natural-language search — the building block of most AI integration work.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where an LLM first retrieves relevant facts from your own documents or database, then uses them to write its answer — so responses are grounded in your real, up-to-date content instead of only the model's training data. RAG is how you build an AI assistant that can accurately answer questions about your products, policies, or knowledge base.
Vector database
- A vector database stores text, images, or other data as numerical embeddings and finds items by meaning rather than exact keywords, returning the closest matches to a query. It is the search layer behind most RAG systems and semantic search, letting an AI feature find the "most relevant" content even when the wording differs.
Fine-tuning
- Fine-tuning is further training an existing model on your own examples so it adopts a specific tone, format, or specialised behaviour the base model doesn't have out of the box. It is more involved than prompting or RAG, and is worth it mainly when you need consistent, repeatable outputs at scale that prompting alone can't reliably produce.
Prompt engineering
- Prompt engineering is the practice of carefully wording and structuring the instructions you send to an LLM to get accurate, consistent, and useful results. Often the cheapest way to improve an AI feature, good prompting — clear context, examples, and constraints — frequently outperforms more complex changes for a fraction of the cost.
AI agent
- An AI agent is a system that uses an LLM to plan and carry out multi-step tasks on its own — calling tools, querying data, and deciding the next action — rather than just answering a single prompt. Agents power workflows like automated research, support triage, or data entry, and are an increasingly common part of AI integration projects.
Data & infrastructure
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
- An ERP is an integrated system that runs a business's core operations — finance, inventory, sales, HR — from one shared database, so every department works from the same data instead of disconnected spreadsheets. We implement and customise ERP through Odoo; whether to use a platform or build your own is covered in Odoo vs a custom ERP.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
- CI/CD is an automated pipeline that tests every code change and then deploys it to your servers without manual steps, so new features and fixes reach users quickly and safely. It catches bugs before they ship and makes releases routine rather than risky — a baseline we set up on every project we maintain.
Cloud
- The cloud refers to computing resources — servers, storage, databases — rented on demand from providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Vercel instead of owning physical hardware. It lets a product scale up when traffic grows and pay only for what it uses, which is why nearly every modern app is hosted in the cloud.
Webhook
- A webhook is an automated message one system sends to another the moment an event happens — for example, a payment provider notifying your app instantly when a customer pays. Unlike an API your app has to keep polling, a webhook pushes data to you in real time, making it the backbone of integrations and live notifications.
Still have a question about your project?
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