👋 The 12 practical software engineering concepts that will make you a better developer
Software jargon causing confusion? Learn 12 key engineering terms to boost understanding, improve team communication, & prevent project pitfalls.
Software engineering is full of jargon: quirky phrases, metaphors, and shorthand terms that carry deep meaning for those in the know.
While they make communication faster among engineers, they can also become a wall between teams when misunderstood.
This disconnect can cause confusion between engineers and nontechnical stakeholders, leading to misaligned expectations, missed risks, and wasted effort.
In this post, you’ll learn 12 terms frequently used by software engineers. Let me know how many did you know already!
🧠 #1 Premature optimization
Premature optimization is the act of trying to make code faster or more efficient before the actual bottlenecks are known.
Why it matters: It leads to wasted time and complexity in areas that might not even be performance-sensitive.
Practical explanation: A developer might write complicated logic to optimize disk I/O before knowing if disk access is even a bottleneck.
Optimizing too early adds code that’s harder to read and maintain. It slows the team down when actual performance issues appear.
🪣 #2 Yak shaving
Yak shaving is doing a chain of small, seemingly unrelated tasks that are needed to reach your main goal.
Why it matters: It can waste hours if you lose sight of your original goal while chasing dependent problems.
Practical explanation: You try to fix a CSS bug, but first you update dependencies, which breaks a build, which leads you to a new CI setup.
Yak shaving hides real progress. It makes task estimates unreliable and leads to frustration.
🧽 #3 Rubber duck debugging
Rubber duck debugging is the process of explaining your code to someone else or even an inanimate object to help yourself understand it better.
Why it matters: It helps catch bugs and improve understanding by forcing clarity.
Practical explanation: A developer talks through a function line by line and suddenly sees a condition that never gets triggered.
This technique works because most bugs are logic errors that reveal themselves when you slow down and articulate your assumptions.
🧱 #4 Technical debt
Technical debt is the extra cost of choosing easier, short-term solutions instead of better, long-term ones.
Why it matters: It makes future changes harder, slower, and riskier.
Practical explanation: Skipping test coverage or hardcoding values to ship faster can later require painful refactors.
When unmanaged, technical debt compounds. It reduces a team's ability to move fast.
🧩 #5 Scope creep
Scope creep is the uncontrolled expansion of a project's goals or features over time.
Why it matters: It delays delivery, burns out teams, and makes products harder to maintain.
Practical explanation: A client asks for “just one more feature” every sprint, eventually doubling the original scope.
Clear requirements and versioning help avoid this problem. Without them, teams keep building without knowing when they're done.
🔥 #6 Shotgun debugging
Shotgun debugging is trying many random changes to fix a bug without understanding its cause.
Why it matters: It leads to fragile fixes that often break in new ways.
Practical explanation: You comment out blocks of code until the crash goes away, then hope the app still works.
It’s reactive and can cause hidden side effects. This is especially true in complex systems.
🚌 #7 Bus factor
The bus factor is the number of people who need to disappear, for example by getting hit by a bus, before a project is in serious trouble.
Why it matters: Low bus factors mean critical knowledge is siloed. That’s a serious risk.
Practical explanation: If one person owns deploys and they go on vacation, releases stop.
Documentation, pairing, and rotation raise the bus factor. They reduce operational risk.
🧰 #8 Gold plating
Gold plating is adding features or polish that weren’t asked for and don’t add value.
Why it matters: It wastes time and adds risk without user benefit.
Practical explanation: An engineer builds a settings page with animations and themes when users just needed toggles.
Polishing things no one requested can create bugs. It also complicates maintenance.
🌊 #9 Boiling the ocean
Boiling the ocean is trying to solve a massive, vague problem all at once.
Why it matters: These efforts rarely finish. Teams burn time with little to show.
Practical explanation: A team tries to fix the whole analytics stack instead of solving one reporting issue.
Focusing on small, valuable wins keeps momentum. It builds confidence and delivers value.
🧪 #10 Cargo cult programming
Cargo cult programming is copying code or patterns without understanding why they work.
Why it matters: It leads to brittle, bloated systems full of unnecessary abstractions.
Practical explanation: A junior engineer copies a Redux setup into a simple form app because that’s what good apps do.
It creates confusion, slows debugging, and misuses tools.
🛠 #11 Trunk-based development
Trunk-based development is a strategy where all engineers commit to the main branch frequently.
Why it matters: It reduces merge conflicts and keeps integration issues small.
Practical explanation: A team commits code multiple times a day behind feature flags and runs automated tests on every push.
It works best with CI pipelines. It encourages small, reversible changes.
💣 #12 Second-system effect
The second-system effect is the tendency to overengineer the second version of a system.
Why it matters: It wastes effort and builds complexity based on ambition, not needs.
Practical explanation: The first version of a chat app was simple and successful. The second tries to add video, payments, and bots from day one.
The result is often a bloated, delayed system. It loses the simplicity users liked.
🎯 Conclusion
Understanding this jargon isn’t about sounding smart, but about speaking the same language.
Whether you’re an engineer trying to explain trade-offs or a product manager trying to follow technical conversations, these terms help surface real engineering challenges quickly.
Knowing them means better teamwork, faster decisions, and fewer surprises down the road.
How many did you know already?
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Fran.
These are 12 steps to become a better and more aware software engineer.
Awesome article, Fran, and thank you so much for the shoutout! 🙏
Some really interesting terms Fran.
Bus factor was something we did consider for our projects once. Also, technical debt is always there as a constant companion...lol.
Also, thanks for the mention!