Task

An atomic unit of work on a project. See activity.

Task Board

The most basic form of a task board is divided into three columns labeled "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." Cards are placed in the columns to reflect the current status of that task.

 

Task Estimate

An estimate for a particular task. Depending on purpose and formality these estimates are often created and captured as part of ongoing planning and tracking and incorporated in work plans and detailed schedules.

TCAP

Transaction Capabilities Application Part

Transaction Capabilities Application Part, from ITU-T recommendations Q.771-Q.775 or ANSI T1.114 is a protocol for Signalling System 7 networks. Its primary purpose is to facilitate multiple concurrent dialogs between the same sub-systems on the same machines, using Transaction IDs to differentiate these, similar to the way TCP ports facilitate multiplexing connections between the same IP addresses on the Internet.
 
TCAP uses ASN.1 BER encoding, as well as the protocols it encapsulates, namely MAP in mobile phone networks or INAP in Intelligent Networks.

Tcl/tk

Tk is a free and open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages.
 
Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to develop desktop applications, such as button, menu, canvas, text, frame, label, etc. Tk has been ported to run on most flavors of Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and Microsoft Windows. Like Tcl, Tk supports Unicode within the Basic Multilingual Plane but it has not yet been extended to handle 32-bit Unicode.
 
Tk was designed to be extended, and a wide range of extensions are available that offer new widgets or other capabilities.
 
Since Tcl/Tk 8, it offers "native look and feel" (for instance, menus and buttons are displayed in the manner of "native" software for any given platform). Highlights of version 8.5 include a new theming engine, originally called Tk Tile, but now generally referred to as "themed Tk", as well as improved font rendering.

TCP

Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.
 

 

Tcsh

tcsh is a Unix shell based on and compatible with the C shell (csh). It is essentially the C shell with programmable command-line completion, command-line editing, and a few other features. Unlike the other common shells, functions cannot be defined in a tcsh script and the user must use aliases instead (as in csh). It is the native root shell for BSD-based systems such as FreeBSD.
 
tcsh added filename and command completion and command line editing concepts borrowed from the Tenex system, which is the source of the "t". Because it only added functionality and did not change what was there, tcsh remained backward compatible with the original C shell. Though it started as a side branch from the original source tree Joy had created, tcsh is now the main branch for ongoing development. tcsh is very stable but new releases continue to appear roughly once a year, consisting mostly of minor bug fixes.

TDD

Test Driven Development

Test-driven development is a style of programming in which three activities are tightly interwoven: coding, testing (in the form of writing unit tests) and design (in the form of refactoring).

TDM

Time Division Multiplexing

Time-division multiplexing (TDM) is a method of transmitting and receiving independent signals over a common signal path by means of synchronized switches at each end of the transmission line so that each signal appears on the line only a fraction of time in an alternating pattern. It is used when the bit rate of the transmission medium exceeds that of the signal to be transmitted. This form of signal multiplexing was developed in telecommunications for telegraphy systems in the late 19th century, but found its most common application in digital telephony in the second half of the 20th century.

 

Team

A "team" in the Agile sense is a small group of people, assigned to the same project or effort, nearly all of them on a full-time basis.

Team Room

The team (ideally the whole team, including the product owner or domain expert) has the use of a dedicated space for the duration of the project, set apart from other groups' activities.

Technical Debt

Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
 
Technical debt can be compared to monetary debt. If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate 'interest', making it harder to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) technical debt is required to move projects forward. On the other hand, some experts claim that the "technical debt" metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it

Template

CxTemp

CxOne template material type. Provides an outline, framework, or container for creating an artifact. See CxOneOverview for description.

Test

See Testing. May also be used to describe an individual test case.

Test Activity

A specific test procedure created by combining one or more test techniques and test types.

Test Case

TC

A description of inputs, execution instructions, and expected results, which are created for the purpose of determining whether a specific software feature works correctly or a specific requirement has been satisfied.

Test Case Specification

TCS

Documents the set of test cases needed to verify one or more product features.

Test Design

Provides a bridge between the test cases and the product's requirements and design. Test design is analogous to software design, and is used when test solutions require a significant amount of analysis and defined structure.
Test design is not software design necessary to support testing (e.g., design of an automated test framework).

Test Design Specification

TDS

Documents the test design for a group of test cases.

Test Level

Synonym for test type.

Test Plan

TP

Documents the scope, approach, resources, test items, and schedule of the testing activities.

Test Technique

Strategy and approach to a test activity.

Test Type

Standard definitions capturing the what, how, why, and when of a test activity.

Testing

Software testing CKA. Dynamic execution of software to detect defects. See CxStand_Testing for more information.

Three Amigos

Three amigos refers to the primary perspectives to examine an increment of work before, during, and after development. Those perspectives are Business, Development, and Testing.

Three C's

"Card, Conversation, Confirmation" is a formula that captures the components of a User Story.

Three Questions

The daily meeting is structured around some variant of the following three questions: What have you completed? What will you do next? What is getting in your way?

TIA

Telecommunications Industry Association

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop voluntary, consensus-based industry standards for a wide variety of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) products, and currently represents nearly 400 companies. TIA's Standards and Technology Department operates twelve engineering committees, which develop guidelines for private radio equipment, cellular towers, data terminals, satellites, telephone terminal equipment, accessibility, VoIP devices, structured cabling, data centers, mobile device communications, multimedia multicast, vehicular telematics, healthcare ICT, machine to machine communications, and smart utility networks.

Timebox

A timebox is a previously agreed period of time during which a person or a team works steadily towards completion of some goal.

TKIP

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol or TKIP /tiːˈkɪp/ is a security protocol used in the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard. TKIP was designed by the IEEE 802.11i task group and the Wi-Fi Alliance as an interim solution to replace WEP without requiring the replacement of legacy hardware. This was necessary because the breaking of WEP had left Wi-Fi networks without viable link-layer security, and a solution was required for already deployed hardware. However, TKIP itself is no longer considered secure, and was deprecated in the 2012 revision of the 802.11 standard.

TLS

Transport Layer Security

Transport Layer Security (TLS) – and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is now deprecated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – are cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network. Several versions of the protocols find widespread use in applications such as web browsing, email, instant messaging, and voice over IP (VoIP). Websites are able to use TLS to secure all communications between their servers and web browsers.
 
The TLS protocol aims primarily to provide privacy and data integrity between two or more communicating computer applications. When secured by TLS, connections between a client (e.g., a web browser) and a server (e.g., wikipedia.org) have one or more of the following properties:
 

• The connection is private (or secure) because symmetric cryptography is used to encrypt the data transmitted. The keys for this symmetric encryption are generated uniquely for each connection and are based on a shared secret negotiated at the start of the session. The server and client negotiate the details of which encryption algorithm and cryptographic keys to use before the first byte of data is transmitted . The negotiation of a shared secret is both secure (the negotiated secret is unavailable to eavesdroppers and cannot be obtained, even by an attacker who places themselves in the middle of the connection) and reliable (no attacker can modify the communications during the negotiation without being detected).
  
• The identity of the communicating parties can be authenticated using public-key cryptography. This authentication can be made optional, but is generally required for at least one of the parties (typically the server).
  
• The connection is reliable because each message transmitted includes a message integrity check using a message authentication code to prevent undetected loss or alteration of the data during transmission.
  
• 
  
•  

TLV

Type(Tag), Length and Value

Within data communication protocols, TLV (type-length-value or tag-length-value) is an encoding scheme used for optional information element in a certain protocol.
 
The type and length are fixed in size (typically 1-4 bytes), and the value field is of variable size. These fields are used as follows:
 
Type
A binary code, often simply alphanumeric, which indicates the kind of field that this part of the message represents;
Length
The size of the value field (typically in bytes);
Value
Variable-sized series of bytes which contains data for this part of the message.
 

 

Token Ring

Token Ring local area network (LAN) technology is a communications protocol for local area networks. It uses a special three-byte frame called a "token" that travels around a logical "ring" of workstations or servers. This token passing is a channel access method providing fair access for all stations, and eliminating the collisions of contention-based access methods.
 
Introduced by IBM in 1984, it was then standardized with protocol IEEE 802.5 and was fairly successful, particularly in corporate environments, but gradually eclipsed by the later versions of Ethernet.

Top Level Schedule

See Business Schedule.

Top-Down Estimation

Estimating a system by deriving values for the entire system, and then splitting the total values among decomposed pieces of the system.

Triple DES

In cryptography, Triple DES (3DES), officially the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA or Triple DEA), is a symmetric-key block cipher, which applies the DES cipher algorithm three times to each data block.
 
While the government and industry standards abbreviate the algorithm's name as TDES (Triple DES) and TDEA (Triple Data Encryption Algorithm), RFC 1851 called it 3DES from the time it first promulgated the idea, and this namesake has since come into wide use by most vendors, users, and cryptographers.

T-Shirt Sizing

T-shirt sizing is a way to practice relative sizing. By comparing stories, you can break them into buckets of extra-small, small, medium, large, and extra-large.
 
Estimating in relative buckets is more important than estimating absolute time or effort. We want to understand how things compare to each other in a rough sense, and not waste time on false precision.

TTY

A terminal emulator, terminal application, or term, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term terminal covers all remote terminals, including graphical interfaces. A terminal emulator inside a graphical user interface is often called a terminal window.
 
A terminal window allows the user access to a text terminal and all its applications such as command-line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface (TUI) applications. These may be running either on the same machine or on a different one via telnet, ssh, or dial-up. On Unix-like operating systems, it is common to have one or more terminal windows connected to the local machine.

TUP

Telephone User Part

Telephone User Part (TUP) provides conventional PSTN telephony services across the Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) network. TUP was the first layer 4 protocol defined by the standards bodies and as such did not provision for ISDN services. It has now largely been replaced by ISUP. However, it can still be found in operational use in some parts of the world (e.g., China).
 
TUP is defined in ITU-T Recommendations Q.721-725. These define the international telephone call control signalling functions for use over SS7.
 
Various national variants of TUP have evolved, some of which provide varying degrees of support for ISDN.

Twisted pair

Twisted pair cabling is a type of wiring in which two conductors of a single circuit are twisted together for the purposes of improving electromagnetic compatibility. Compared to a single conductor or an untwisted balanced pair, a twisted pair reduces electromagnetic radiation, crosstalk between neighboring pairs and improves rejection of external electromagnetic interference