Developer pillar · Reference

Developer terminology glossary

Essential development terms you’ll encounter. Bookmark this for reference.

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Controls stack visual kit

Reusable icons and a telemetry-to-audit diagram aligned to our fundamentals and operational guides.

Governance evidence

Use for control statements that cite ISO/IEC 42001 clause 6.3 change management, EU AI Act Articles 62–75, and SOC 2 trust service criteria.

Secure supply chain

Pair with SBOM, provenance, and intake guidance that references SPDX or CycloneDX formats, SLSA Level 3 attestations, and NIST SSDF tasks PS.3/PO.4.

Telemetry & evaluations

Highlight logging of prompts, responses, refusal rates, and safety filters alongside adversarial evaluation suites from NIST AI RMF playbooks or UK AISI guidance.

Assurance & resilience

Use for incident response and assurance artefacts that must meet OMB M-24-10 24-hour notifications, CIRCIA’s 72-hour clocks, and serious-incident duties under the EU AI Act.

Signals Controls Evidence Audit

Signals: prompt traces, supplier advisories, and safety filter activations streamed into monitoring.
Controls: guardrails, change review, SBOM validation, and access enforcement tied to AI lifecycle gates.
Evidence: runbooks that capture artefacts for ISO/IEC 42001 management reviews and SOC 2 narratives.
Audit: regulator-facing packets that satisfy EU AI Act post-market monitoring, OMB M-24-10, and CIRCIA timelines.

Programming fundamentals

Variable: Named storage location for data. Can hold different values during program execution.
Function: Reusable block of code that performs a specific task. Takes inputs (parameters), returns outputs.
Object: Instance of a class containing data (properties) and behaviours (methods). Core to OOP.
Class: Blueprint for creating objects. Defines properties and methods that objects will have.
API (Application Programming Interface): Contract defining how software components communicate. Can be web APIs, library APIs, etc.
Library: Collection of pre-written code that developers can use. Imported into projects to add functionality.
Framework: Pre-built structure for developing applications. Provides patterns and tools. React, Django, Spring.
Dependency: External code your project requires. Managed by package managers (npm, pip, Maven).

Version control and collaboration

Git: Distributed version control system. Tracks changes to code over time.
Repository (repo): Storage location for a project, including all files and version history.
Commit: Snapshot of changes at a point in time. Includes a message describing what changed.
Branch: Parallel version of code. Allows development without affecting the main codebase.
Merge: Combining changes from one branch into another.
Pull request (PR): Proposal to merge changes into a repository. Enables code review before merging.
Conflict: When two changes affect the same code. Requires manual resolution.

Development practices

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): Automated pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys code changes.
Unit test: Test that verifies a small piece of code (function, method) works correctly.
Integration test: Test that verifies multiple components work correctly together.
Code review: Practice of having others examine code changes before merging.
Refactoring: Restructuring existing code without changing its behaviour. Improves readability/maintainability.
Technical debt: Shortcuts taken during development that will need to be addressed later.
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself): Principle of avoiding code duplication. Extract shared logic into reusable components.
SOLID: Five principles of object-oriented design: Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion.

Tools and environments

IDE (Integrated Development Environment): Software that provides comprehensive tools for coding: editor, debugger, compiler. VS Code, IntelliJ, PyCharm.
Debugger: Tool for finding and fixing bugs by stepping through code execution.
Linter: Tool that analyses code for errors, style issues, and suspicious patterns. ESLint, Pylint.
Compiler: Translates high-level code into machine code. Runs before execution.
Interpreter: Executes code line by line at runtime. Python and JavaScript are interpreted.
Runtime: Environment where code executes. Node.js is a JavaScript runtime.
Package manager: Tool for installing and managing dependencies. npm (JavaScript), pip (Python), Maven (Java).
Environment variables: Configuration values set outside the code. Used for secrets, settings, deployment config.

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