Custom software development creates tailored digital solutions for your specific business needs. Unlike off-the-shelf products, custom software fits your business processes instead of making you adapt to generic tools.
This glossary explains essential technical and business terms you’ll encounter when building software, choosing between outsourcing models, planning product development, or evaluating API integrations.
How to Use This Glossary
By section. Jump to the area that matches your current questions: core concepts, development process, technical foundation, data, security, costs, or business strategy.
Before talking to development teams, use these definitions to clarify requirements and speak the same language with your team or partner.
To plan your next project, use these definitions to build realistic project plans by understanding MVP scope, managing technical debt, and choosing the right team model.
Core Concepts
Custom Software Development
Building software applications specifically tailored to meet unique business requirements and workflows.
Why it matters: Provides competitive advantages through features that directly support your specific business model and product development strategy.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Product development: from discovery and MVP to full-scale product.
- Outsourcing software development: a dedicated team or a specific team member to build and maintain your solution.
Bespoke Software/Solution
Another term for custom software, emphasizing the tailored, made-to-order development approach.
Off-the-Shelf vs Custom
Pre-built software is designed for general use, as opposed to solutions built from scratch for specific organizational needs.
Why it matters: Off-the-shelf tools are faster to start, but they often require adjusting your processes to fit their limitations.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Complete software cost over its lifecycle, including development, maintenance, hosting, and support expenses.
Why it matters: Provides accurate financial comparison between custom development and off-the-shelf alternatives, helping justify investment decisions.
Vendor Lock-in
Situation where switching to alternative software becomes difficult due to proprietary formats or high migration costs.
Why it matters: It can limit future technology choices and increase long-term expenses significantly, making partner selection crucial.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Financial metric measuring the profitability of software investment by comparing gains against development and operational costs.
Why it matters: ROI helps you prioritise features and projects that move revenue, margin, or efficiency.
Development Process
Discovery
Initial phase: analyzing business requirements, technical constraints, and user needs to define project scope.
Why it matters: Proper discovery prevents costly changes and ensures the final product meets actual business needs during product development.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Product development: structured discovery and solution design before writing code.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Basic software version including only essential features needed to validate core assumptions and deliver initial value.
Why it matters: An MVP helps you validate demand, test pricing, and learn from real usage before committing to a full feature set.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Product development: MVP planning, design, and implementation.
Agile/Scrum/Kanban
Development methodologies emphasizing iterative progress, regular feedback, and adaptive planning rather than rigid upfront specifications.
Why it matters: Agile approaches help you adapt to changing requirements, reduce delivery risk, and see progress in weeks instead of months.
Sprint
Time-boxed development period (typically 1-4 weeks) focused on delivering specific features or improvements.
Why it matters: Sprints create predictable planning cycles, clearer priorities, and more frequent releases to users.
Scope Creep
Gradual expansion of project requirements beyond the original agreement without corresponding adjustments to timeline or budget.
Why it matters: It can significantly delay projects and increase costs if not managed properly during the development process.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Final testing phase where actual users validate that the software meets business requirements and works as expected.
Why it matters: UAT catches gaps between specifications and real-world usage before going live.
Prototype vs Proof of Concept (PoC)
Prototype: a visual or interactive model that shows user flows, screens, and how the product will feel.
Proof of Concept (PoC): a small technical experiment that verifies if a specific approach or technology is feasible.
Why it matters: Prototypes de-risk UX and product decisions; PoCs de-risk technical decisions.
Product Roadmap
Strategic document outlining planned features, improvements, and milestones over time for software development.
Why it matters: The roadmap aligns founders, product, and engineering teams around priorities and shows how custom software development supports business goals.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Product development: roadmap planning, backlog management, and long-term product evolution.
Dedicated Development Team
A long-term cross-functional team from an external partner that works on your product as if they were part of your company.
Why it matters: You get stable capacity and product knowledge without building a full in-house team.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Outsourcing software development: dedicated Product Development Teams and Product Maintenance Teams.
Staff Augmentation
A model where you extend your in-house team with external specialists (for example, a senior backend engineer, data engineer, or DevOps).
Why it matters: Staff augmentation lets you cover skill gaps quickly, keep delivery moving, and stay flexible.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Outsourcing software development: team extension and staff augmentation.
- Our guide on how to work with an outsourcing team.
Product Maintenance Team
A team focused on maintaining and improving an existing product: bug fixes, small features, performance, and infrastructure updates.
Why it matters: Dedicated maintenance keeps critical systems stable while your core team focuses on new development.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Outsourcing: Product Maintenance Teams.
Technical Foundation
API (Application Programming Interface)
Rules and protocols allow different software applications to communicate and share data.
Why it matters: Good APIs let you connect internal systems, partner tools, and third-party services instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Related SliceIQ services:
- API development & integration: designing, building, and integrating custom APIs.
REST/GraphQL
Two common styles for designing APIs:
- REST: uses standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, etc.), simple and widely adopted.
- GraphQL: lets clients request exactly the data they need in one call, offering more flexibility.
Why it matters: The choice can affect performance, flexibility, and how easy it is to integrate with other systems.
Related SliceIQ services:
Webhooks
Automated messages are sent from one application to another when specific events occur, allowing real-time data synchronization.
Why it matters: Webhooks enable real-time integrations and workflows without constant polling between systems.
Related SliceIQ services:
Cloud Infrastructure
Computing resources are delivered over the internet, including servers, databases, and networking capabilities.
Why it matters: Reduces upfront costs and enables automatic scaling based on business demand, with optimization tools like CloudAvocado reducing non-production costs.
Microservices vs Monolith
Monolith: the whole application is one unit.
Microservices: functionality is split into small, independent services that communicate via APIs.
Why it matters: Affects scalability, maintenance complexity, and team organization as your business grows.
Related SliceIQ services:
- API development & integration: microservice-friendly API design.
- Product development: choosing the right architecture for your stage.
Containers
Lightweight packages that include applications and all their dependencies, ensuring consistent behavior across different environments.
Why it matters: Containers simplify deployment, scaling, and rollback, making releases more predictable.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Deployment)
Automated processes that:
- regularly merge code changes,
- run tests,
- and deploy new versions of your software.
Why it matters: CI/CD reduces manual errors, shortens release cycles, and makes updates less risky.
Serverless
Cloud model where providers automatically manage infrastructure, allowing developers to focus solely on application code.
Why it matters: Serverless can reduce infrastructure overhead and costs for event-driven workloads.
Caching
Temporarily storing frequently accessed data to improve application response times and reduce server load.
Why it matters: Caching improves performance and reduces infrastructure load, especially for read-heavy applications.
Data and Performance
Database
An organized system for storing, managing, and retrieving business data efficiently.
Why it matters: Databases are the backbone of your product. They store customer information, transactions, logs, and more.
Data Migration
Process of moving data from legacy systems to new platforms while ensuring accuracy and accessibility.
Why it matters: Poor migration can lead to data loss, reporting errors, and broken workflows.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Big data development & consulting: planning and executing complex migrations.
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
A process where data is:
- Extracted from source systems,
- Transformed into a clean, consistent format,
- Loaded into a target system (often a data warehouse).
Why it matters: ETL powers reliable reporting, dashboards, and advanced analytics.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Big data: building ETL pipelines and analytics platforms.
Big Data
Large data volumes (terabytes to petabytes) from multiple sources: application logs, IoT sensors, and external APIs that require specialized processing and storage.
Why it matters: With the right pipelines and models, big data can reveal patterns, drive predictive maintenance, and uncover new revenue opportunities.
Related SliceIQ services:
Latency
The time it takes for a request to travel through your system and return a response.
Why it matters: High latency makes applications feel slow and frustrates users, especially in real-time or data-intensive scenarios.
Scalability
The ability of your system to handle increased load (more users, more data, more requests) by adding resources or optimizing architecture.
Why it matters: A scalable system grows with your business instead of becoming a bottleneck.
Uptime
The percentage of time your system is working and available to users.
Why it matters: High uptime is critical for mission-critical systems in industries like energy, finance, or logistics.
Security and Compliance
Data Encryption
Protection of data while stored on servers and transmitted between systems using advanced cryptographic methods.
Why it matters: Encryption helps prevent data breaches and supports compliance with regulations and customer contracts.
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
Systems determine who can access what resources and perform which actions within software applications.
Why it matters: Proper IAM reduces the risk of unauthorized access and helps enforce least-privilege access.
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Any data that could identify specific individuals needs special handling and protection under privacy regulations.
Why it matters: Mishandling PII can result in significant legal penalties and reputation damage.
Audit Trail
Detailed logs of who accessed what data and when, providing accountability and supporting compliance requirements.
Why it matters: Audit trails support compliance, internal investigations, and incident response.
Penetration Testing
Authorized simulated cyber attacks to identify security vulnerabilities before malicious actors can exploit them.
Why it matters: Regular pen tests help you fix vulnerabilities early and prove your security posture to clients and regulators.
Cost Management
FinOps
Bringing financial accountability to cloud spending through monitoring, analysis, and optimization of infrastructure costs.
Why it matters: FinOps helps you reduce cloud waste, align costs with business value, and make better capacity decisions.
Cost Optimization
Ongoing efforts to reduce infrastructure expenses while maintaining required performance and reliability levels.
Why it matters: Tools like CloudAvocado can reduce development environment costs by up to 70% through automated scheduling.
Rightsizing
Adjusting computing resources to match actual usage patterns, eliminating over-provisioned capacity.
Why it matters: Rightsizing eliminates waste and often brings quick, visible savings on your cloud bill.
OpEx vs CapEx
OpEx (Operating Expenditure): ongoing costs such as cloud usage or support.
CapEx (Capital Expenditure): upfront investments such as buying servers or long-term licenses.
Why it matters: Cloud and outsourcing software development tend to be OpEx-heavy, which affects budgeting and accounting decisions.
Business Strategy
Legacy Modernization
Replacing or rebuilding aging systems with modern technologies while keeping business operations running.
Why it matters: Necessary for maintaining security, reducing costs, and enabling new business capabilities.
Software Development Services
Professional services, including custom development, system integration, and ongoing maintenance provided by external teams.
Why it matters: Gives you access to specialized expertise without building internal development capacity when outsourcing software development.
Related SliceIQ services:
- Product development
- Outsourcing software development
- Big data development & consulting
- API development & integration
Technical Debt
Accumulated cost of choosing quick implementation over better design, requiring future refactoring work.
Why it matters: Without managing technical debt, future changes become slower, riskier, and more expensive.
Refactoring
Restructuring existing code to improve readability, performance, or maintainability without changing functionality.
Why it matters: Regular refactoring keeps your product easier to maintain, extend, and test.
Feature Flags
Switches that enable or disable specific features in production without deploying new code.
Why it matters: Feature flags support gradual rollouts, A/B tests, and fast rollback if something goes wrong.
Understanding these terms helps you make informed decisions about custom software development and work effectively with development teams. Ready to explore your options? Contact our team for a consultation on your specific needs.
