Glossary¶

Centralized definitions for domain, architectural, and project terminology. Terms defined at level-3 headings (### Term) are automatically linked and shown as tooltips on first mention across the documentation via zensical-glossary.

Documentation and Governance¶

Decision Record¶

A document capturing an architectural, product, design, operational, security, social, or strategic decision, including context, constraints, considered alternatives, chosen approach, and consequences.

Feature Record¶

A specification document defining the context, benchmarks, user interaction flows, visual design, and implementation details for a user-facing or system feature.

RFC 2119¶

A specification standard defining requirement levels for capitalized keywords: MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY, and OPTIONAL.

Conventional Commits¶

A structured commit message convention (type(scope): description) providing explicit, machine-readable version history and automated changelog generation.

Semantic Versioning¶

A software release versioning convention structured as MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, distinguishing breaking API changes, backward-compatible features, and bug fixes.

Architecture and Modeling¶

Data-Flow Diagram¶

A visual model tracing how data moves through a system, mapping input ingestion, functional transformations, data stores, and emitted outputs across boundaries.

Use-Case Diagram¶

A visual model depicting interactions between external actors (users, external services) and the discrete actions or services provided by the system.

Functional Requirement¶

A specification of a behavior, service, calculation, data manipulation, or specific business operation that the software system must perform.

Non-Functional Requirement¶

A specification of system-wide quality constraints, including performance, security, reliability, availability, portability, and maintainability thresholds.

Quality Factor¶

An observable, measurable software quality attribute (such as modularity, survivability, operability, or verifiability) used to evaluate design trade-offs.

Class Diagram¶

A static structure diagram describing the classes, interfaces, attributes, methods, and relationships constituting an object-oriented system.

Object Diagram¶

A structural diagram depicting a complete or partial snapshot of instantiated objects and their runtime relationships at a specific point in execution.

Software Licensing and Distribution¶

Permissive License¶

An open-source license (such as MIT or Apache-2.0) that permits unrestricted commercial use, modification, and proprietary distribution, requiring only attribution.

Copyleft¶

A licensing rule (such as GPL or MPL) requiring derivative works or modifications to be distributed under equivalent license terms to preserve open access.

SPDX¶

A standard format and curated registry of short identifiers (such as MIT, Apache-2.0, or GPL-3.0-only) used to express software licenses unambiguously.

AI and Collaboration Guidelines¶

Generative AI¶

Algorithms, large language models, and automated tools used to generate source code, documentation, test suites, or design artifacts under human supervision.

Meat-Proxy¶

An anti-pattern where a human blindly copy-pastes AI outputs or questions back and forth without understanding, reviewing, or taking responsibility for the content.

Domain Terms¶

Example Domain Term¶

Replace this entry with project-specific domain terms. Keep each definition to one or two concise sentences so tooltips remain easy to scan.