When you're buying software, half the battle is the vocabulary. This glossary defines — in plain English — the terms you'll meet in every scoping call, proposal and project plan. Written for founders, operations leaders and buyers, not developers. Bookmark it.
A defined way for two pieces of software to talk to each other, usually over the internet. When you see "Stripe API" or "Xero API", it means those products expose a programmatic interface that other software can call to read or write data.
An AI system that doesn't just answer questions but takes actions — calling your APIs, updating records, sending emails — usually chained together by a large language model. Different from a chatbot, which only talks.
Software built specifically for one organisation's workflows, rather than sold off-the-shelf to many customers. Also called custom software or tailored software. Logic Racks builds bespoke software — see Bespoke Software Development.
Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment. The automated pipeline that tests code the moment it's committed and ships it safely to production. A working CI/CD pipeline is what turns "we deploy once a month" into "we deploy ten times a day".
Content Management System. A tool that lets non-developers create and edit content on a website. WordPress is a traditional CMS; Storyblok and Sanity are headless CMSs. See also CMS & Platform Engineering.
Google's three page-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, how fast the main content loads), Interaction to Next Paint (INP, how responsive the page feels), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS, how much the page jumps around). Pages that pass Core Web Vitals rank better.
The practice of designing and building software specifically for one organisation's needs. Synonym for bespoke software development.
The discipline of automating how software is built, tested, deployed and operated — and bridging the gap between developers who write code and the infrastructure that runs it. See Cloud & DevOps.
A short, paid engagement at the start of a project (usually 1–2 weeks) to define scope, architecture and a fixed delivery plan. It means the eventual quote is real, not an estimate.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Google's framework for evaluating content quality. Pages with real author bios, first-hand experience signals and clear authority rank better, particularly in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics.
Electronic Point of Sale. The till system in a retail or hospitality business — hardware (screen, printer, card reader) and software that records sales, prints receipts and syncs to inventory.
Enterprise Resource Planning. A single business platform that ties together finance, inventory, manufacturing, HR and procurement. Examples: SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage 200.
A content management system that exposes content via API rather than rendering a website itself. Your front-end (Next.js, Astro, a mobile app) pulls content from the headless CMS and renders it however it wants. Gives you speed, flexibility and the ability to swap either layer.
Google's Core Web Vital that measures how responsive a page feels when users click, tap or type. Replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. A good INP is under 200ms; above 500ms is poor.
The practice of defining cloud infrastructure (servers, databases, networks) in text files that can be version-controlled and reviewed, rather than clicking through a cloud console. Terraform, Pulumi and AWS CDK are popular IaC tools.
An open-source platform for running and scaling containerised applications across many servers. Powerful but complex — usually overkill for small teams, essential once you run dozens of services.
A Core Web Vital that measures when the largest meaningful element (usually the hero image or main heading) appears on screen. Good LCP is under 2.5 seconds on mobile.
An AI model trained on huge amounts of text to predict likely next words. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini and Llama are LLMs. They power ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and most modern AI-enabled software.
An architecture style where an application is split into many small, independent services that communicate over APIs. Gives you team independence and scalability; costs you operational complexity.
The smallest version of a product that still solves the problem well enough for real users to pay for or rely on it. An MVP is not a prototype; it's a live product with a scoped feature set.
An application architecture where many customers (tenants) share the same instance of the software, with data isolation enforced in code. The standard model for SaaS. Compare to single-tenant, where each customer gets their own dedicated deployment.
Software sold pre-built to many customers — Shopify, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Microsoft 365. Opposite of bespoke software. Cheaper upfront, constrained by the product's decisions.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. The security standard every business that handles credit card data must follow. Version 4 is the current standard. Minimising scope (tokenising cards, using hosted fields) is the usual strategy.
The till. See EPOS for the full acronym. "POS system" usually means the whole package: hardware, software, card payments, printer and integration to stock.
A website that behaves like a native app — installable to the home screen, works offline, sends push notifications. Cheaper than native mobile apps; less powerful than native for camera, Bluetooth and advanced features.
A pattern for building AI features where the model answers only from a specific set of your documents or data, not its own training. Reduces hallucination and makes every answer traceable to a source. See AI Software Development.
Software as a Service. Software delivered as a subscription you access through a browser, with no install. Shopify, Xero, HubSpot, Notion are all SaaS. The opposite is on-premise or shrink-wrapped software. See SaaS Development.
A cloud-computing model where the provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Vercel) runs your code on demand without you managing servers. You pay per request, scale to zero when idle, and your infrastructure gets out of the way.
A web application that loads once and updates the page in-place as you navigate, rather than requesting a fresh HTML document for every link. Feels more app-like; requires careful SEO work.
Logging into many applications with one account. Common in workplaces — one Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace login unlocks Slack, Notion, GitHub and the rest. Built on standards like SAML and OIDC.
The accumulated cost of choosing fast, expedient solutions over clean ones in software. Like financial debt, some is fine and fuels growth; too much chokes progress. Managed through regular refactoring.
A database designed to store and search embeddings — the numerical representations AI models use for text, images or audio. Essential for building RAG systems and semantic search. Examples: Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector.
An HTTP callback — one application posts data to another the moment an event happens, rather than the receiver polling for updates. Example: Stripe posts to your server when a payment succeeds.
A security model that assumes no user, device or network is trustworthy by default — every request must be authenticated and authorised. The opposite of the old "trusted internal network" model. NCSC-recommended for UK businesses.