Software Engineering Terms - M

Sunday, October 2, 2011


MAINTENANCE
The process of supporting production software to detect and correct faults, optimize
performance, and ensure appropriate availability to end-users.

MASTER TABLE
A table containing data on which detail data in another table depends. Master tables
have a primary key that's matched to a foreign key in a detail table and often have a oneto-
many relationship with detail tables.

MEGABYTE (MB)
Approximately one million bytes. A unit of computer storage capacity.

MEGAHERTZ (MHZ)
A measure of the clock speed of the CPU in a computer. One megahertz equals one
million cycles per second.

METADATA
Data that describes the structure, organization, and/or location of data. In essence,
metadata is "data about data."

METHODOLOGY
A set of processes, procedures, and standards that defines an engineering approach to
the development of a work product.

METRICS
Numeric data representing measurements of business processes or database activity.

MILESTONE
In project management, a scheduled event of significance for which an individual or team
is accountable. Often used to measure progress.

MODEL
An abstract representation that illustrates the components or relationships of a specified
application or module.

MODULE
A functional part of an application that is discrete and identifiable with a specific subject.

MODULE TESTING
The process of testing individual software modules or sets of related modules to verify
the implementation of the software.

MULTIUSER
Concurrent access to a single database by more than one user, usually through the use
of client workstations.

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Software Engineering Terms - L


LIFECYCLE
A set of software development activities, or stages that function together to guide the
development and maintenance of software products. Each stage is finite in scope,
requires a specific set of inputs, and produces a specific set of deliverables.

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Software Engineering Terms - K


KEY FIELD
A field used to identify a record or group of records by its value. See also primary key
and foreign key.

KEY PROCESS AREA
A software engineering process identified by the Software Engineering Institute Capability
Maturity Model that is an essential to an organization's ability to develop consistently
high-quality software products.

KILOBYTE (KB)
One thousand bytes (actually 1024 storage positions). Used as a measure of storage
capacity.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
The process of systematically managing and leveraging the stores of knowledge in an
organization. This knowledge is generally stored as sets of documents or database
records.

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Software Engineering Terms - J


JOIN
A database operation or command that links the rows or records of two or more tables by
one or more columns in each table.

JOINT APPLICATION DESIGN (JAD)
A design technique that brings users and IT professionals into a facilitated meeting for
the purpose of interactively designing an application.

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Software Engineering Terms - I


IMPLEMENTATION ELEMENTS
A specific software component created to fulfill a specific function defined in the
functional and system design documents.

IMPLEMENTATION STAGE
A stage in the software development lifecycle during which a software product is created
from the design specifications and testing is performed on the individual software units
produced. Also referred to as the programming stage.

INCREMENTAL DEVELOPMENT
A software development technique where multiple small software development lifecycles
are used to develop the overall software product in a modular fashion.

INDEX
A specialized data structure used to facilitate rapid access to individual database records
or groups of records.

INFORMATION
Data that has been shaped into a form that is meaningful and useful to humans.

INFORMATION SYSTEM
Interrelated components working together to collect, process, store, and disseminate
information to support decision-making, coordination, control, analysis, and/or
visualization in an organization.

INHERITANCE
A feature of object-oriented programming where a specific class of objects receives the
features of a more general class.

INITIAL DATA LOAD
When a new database application is first brought online, certain sets of data are
preloaded to support operations. In some cases, a large amount of data is transferred
from one or more legacy systems that the new database application is replacing. The
initial data load figure is calculated as the sum of all records in operational and support
data areas on day zero of the applications production lifecycle. This figure is used as a
baseline for estimating development effort, server hardware requirements and network
loads.

INNER QUERY
Synonym for sub query.

INSERTION POINT
The position of the cursor within a block of text.

INSPECTION
Also termed desk checking. A quality assurance technique that relies on visual
examination of developed products (usually source code or design documentation) to
detect errors, violation of development standards, and other problems.

INSTALLATION STAGE
A software lifecycle stage that consists of the testing, training, and conversion efforts
necessary to place the developed software application into production.

INTEGRITY
The degree to which a software component or application prevents unauthorized access
to, or modification of, programs or data.

INTEGER
A whole number, usually limited to a range of -32,000 to +32,000.

INTERFACE
A formal connection point defined between two independent applications for the purpose
of data exchange.

INTERFACE TESTING
A testing technique that evaluates whether software components pass data and control
correctly to one another.

INTERSECTION
A group of data elements included in two or more tables as part of a Join operation. 

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Software Engineering Terms - H


HARDWARE
Physical computer equipment and peripherals used to process, store, or transmit
software applications or data.

HIERARCHICAL MENU
A menu with multiple levels, consisting of a main Menubar that leads to one or more
levels of sub menus from which choices or actions are made.

HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE (HTML)
A programming tool that uses HyperText to establish dynamic links to other documents
stored in the same or remote computers.

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Software Engineering Terms - G


GROUP

During report generation, one or more records that are collected into a single category, usually for the purpose of totaling. Also used to identify a collection of database users with common access privileges. 

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Chitika

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