Your role as a Product Manager is a versatile one. Whether you have or not technical or marketing experience, you’ll have to deal with it. Therefore, you will meet a lot of abbreviations and technical terms.
This article is here to help you understand most common abbreviations you’ll see in the theory and articles about product management.
A/B testing (also known as bucket tests or split-run testing) is a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B. It includes application of statistical hypothesis testing or “two-sample hypothesis testing” as used in the field of statistics. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable, typically by testing a subject’s response to variant A against variant B, and determining which of the two variants is more effective.
Automated code review software checks source code for compliance with a predefined set of rules or best practices. The use of analytical methods to inspect and review source code to detect bugs has been a standard development practice. This process can be accomplished both manually and in an automated fashion.
ATDD – Acceptance test–driven development (ATDD) is a development methodology based on communication between the business customers, the developers, and the testers. ATDD encompasses many of the same practices as specification by example (SBE), behavior-driven development (BDD), example-driven development (EDD), and support-driven development also called story test–driven development (SDD). All these processes aid developers and testers in understanding the customer’s needs prior to implementation and allow customers to be able to converse in their own domain language.
BDD – In software engineering, behavior-driven development (BDD) is an Agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, QA and non-technical or business participants in a software project. It encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to formalize a shared understanding of how the application should behave. It emerged from test-driven development (TDD). Behavior-driven development combines the general techniques and principles of TDD with ideas from domain-driven design and object-oriented analysis and design to provide software development and management teams with shared tools and a shared process to collaborate on software development.
Burn Down Chart – A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal. That is, it is a run chart of outstanding work. It is useful for predicting when all of the work will be completed. It is often used in agile software development methodologies such as Scrum. However, burn down charts can be applied to any project containing measurable progress over time.
CD / CDE – Continuous delivery (CD or CDE) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, doing so manually. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
CI – In software engineering, continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developers’ working copies to a shared mainline several times a day.
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops) which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
DoD – The definition of done is an agreed upon list of the activities necessary to get a product increment to a done state by the end of a sprint. Used in the SCRUM framework.
Functional testing is a quality assurance (QA) process and a type of black-box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of the software component under test. Functions are tested by feeding them input and examining the output, and internal program structure is rarely considered (unlike white-box testing). Functional testing is conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system or component with specified functional requirements. Functional testing usually describes what the system does.
Lean UX – Lean User Experience (Lean UX) design is a mindset, culture, and a process that embraces Lean-Agile methods. It implements functionality in minimum viable increments and determines success by measuring results against a benefit hypothesis. Read more…
MoSCoW – The MoSCoW method is a prioritization technique used in management, business analysis, project management, and software development to reach a common understanding with stakeholders on the importance they place on the delivery of each requirement; it is also known as MoSCoW prioritization or MoSCoW analysis. The term MoSCoW itself is an acronym derived from the first letter of each of four prioritization categories (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have), with the interstitial Os added to make the word pronounceable. While the Os are usually in lower-case to indicate that they do not stand for anything, the all-capitals MOSCOW is also used.
MVP – A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future product development.
Opportunity Cost – the opportunity cost, or alternative cost, of making a particular choice is the value of the most valuable choice out of those that were not taken. When an option is chosen from alternatives, the opportunity cost is the “cost” incurred by not enjoying the benefit associated with the best alternative choice. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.“
PBI – Product Backlog Item. Used in the SCRUM framework.
Regression testing is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change. If not, that would be called a regression.
SAFe – The Scaled Agile Framework (abbreviated as SAFe) is a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices. Along with large-scale Scrum (LeSS), disciplined agile delivery (DAD), and Nexus, SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team. SAFe is made freely available by Scaled Agile, Inc., which retains the copyrights and registered trademarks.
SWOT analysis (or SWOT matrix) is a strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. It is intended to specify the objectives of the business venture or project and identify the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving those objectives.
TDD – Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the software is improved so that the tests pass. This is opposed to software development that allows software to be added that is not proven to meet requirements.
User Story – In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members.
Unit Testing – In computer programming, unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code, sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures, are tested to determine whether they are fit for use.
XP – Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent “releases” in short development cycles, which is intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
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