Vocab 101 for the Web Savvy Marketer

As a marketer working with very talented web/software developers, I’ve come to terms with knowing that I’ll likely never understand every word that my coworkers toss back and forth.

Whether talking about Probo CI (a tool for continuous integration — see below) or Bash (shell scripting, obviously), there are just some words and concepts that are just over my head. But there are lots of other words that my coworkers toss back and forth that I do need to know, as they are used commonly and pertain to the everyday process of working with a website.

This is a collection of words I hear pretty regularly — whether the words are used with respect to client projects, or even the Isovera workflow in general.

Code Review

(verb) — the act of having a secondary developer review the code written by an original developer before the code is deployed. Code review is beneficial, as it makes the original developer much more contentious while coding, and allows for a secondary “fail safe” for catching any mistakes that could be made in the original code.

Analogy time! Code Review is like the “proofreader” for development work — making sure nothing is missed and there are no embarrassing mistakes that could lead to something bad… like your site crashing.

Continuous Integration, or CI

(verb) — the practice of having developers merge all of their code into a central repository multiple times throughout a workflow (for most situations, this means several times a day!). CI is done so that any problems or overlap in work can be detected early, fixed, and sometimes even prevented.

Analogy time! Continuous Integration is kind of like a group presentation in PowerPoint, where each person works on one portion and work is emailed frequently to other team members with each new iteration of a project, thus making sure the divide and conquer method is both effective and efficient.

Deploy

(verb) — implementing all of the processes that were done to make a change in a website, or to launch a site. Deployment is the final part of the process to making a site “go live”. After deployment, changes to a website’s code will be implemented.

Dev/ Stage/ Prod

(nouns) — steps in the website workflow; a website goes from development to staging to production, each stage bringing the website closer to launch. A typical workflow looks like: Development, Staging, QA, Deployment, Production, in which:

Dev, or Development (noun) — the initial coding and creation of a website. This is when the code that makes up a website is written, and is essentially when a website is built.

Stage (noun) — the next stage of the website workflow is staging, and when a website is “in stage” it is the final pass at the development of a website before it is rolled out and opened up to the public. Staging is where the majority of website testing is done. If done well, the “staging site” will look similar to the final production site.

Prod, or Production (noun) — the final stage of the site, when the website is “live” and open to the public. This is the final site. When a site is on production, it means all of the changes that have been made are now viewable by web users.

Analogy time! The website workflow is much like a book publication workflow. Development is the initial brainstorming and first drafts of a book. Stage is where final tweaks and touches are put in place, and when others come in to read, review, and edit your book; at the end of this stage your draft book should look pretty similar to your final book post publication. Production is the final stage, where the book is put in print and published.

Repository, or Repo

(noun) — the central place where all of a website’s data is held and where users can go to find historical data. For web developers, the repository is the “single source of truth” for a code base, and is where peer developers can look at a website’s code to better understand a website.

Example time! A commonly used repository is GitHub, which holds information about multiple projects at once and allows teams to keep track of who is doing what, what has been done, and what needs to still to be done. This enables developers, project managers, and people involved in a project to collaborate, keep track of data, and see at what stage a project is at.

Sprint

(noun) — a task or series of tasks that are expected to be completed during a set amount of time. A big part of a sprints is sprint planning, which lays out what should be done when and by who, and ensures that the time spent on a sprint is efficient and effective.

We Hope…

… that these vocab words help you navigate the web development side of things on your next web project (or even give you a better understanding of office jargon if you’re working amongst web developers and designers!)!

Question? Comments? Suggestions? Common words you’d like to see included? Drop me a line and let me know!

This article was originally published by Maggie Newberg on our Isovera blog.