Glossary

The terms we use on this site and in our reports, and exactly what we mean by each one.

Map

A fixed-price assessment for new projects and live platforms. On live platforms: what regression actually costs on each one, which are worth covering, and in what order, from your own cost, cadence and incident numbers. On a new project: the first journeys, the scope register and the order of work. It ends in a routing decision. More on Map.

Pod

A managed pre-production service that builds and stabilises the automation, test data, CI connection and evidence for agreed journeys, then hands over an asset you own. Not staff augmentation, and not a team for hire. More on Pod.

Cover

Recurring functional assurance for named business journeys: maintained checks, an assessed status every cycle, and a stated limit on what that status covers. Cover is the destination; Map and Pod are the ways in. More on Cover.

Routing decision

The recommendation a Map ends in. It may be Cover, Pod then Cover, hire an engineer, leave the platform alone, or decommission it, whichever the numbers support.

Verdict

The status a named lead gives each journey at the end of every cycle: one of the four below, never a pass percentage. A verdict is evidence, not a release approval. The release decision stays yours.

Verified

The journey was checked and the evidence supports it.

Verified with residual risk

Checked, and it passes, but something known remains, and we say what.

Not verified

It ran, and it did not pass. There is a result and the result is a problem.

Not assessed

It did not run at all: out of scope this cycle, blocked, or not in the register. No result exists, so it is not a finding either way.

Named lead

The person at Saucinco who assesses the evidence each cycle and puts their name to the verdict.

Named journey

A path through your system that matters to the business, such as signing up, paying or claiming, written down with its entry, outcome, variants, data, environment and owner. Scope is set by naming journeys, not by counting hours.

Scope register

The list of named journeys in scope. A journey counts as covered only once it is in the register and has been accepted against a working environment. Nothing is added quietly, and nothing is billed quietly.

Complexity band

How each journey is sized: Standard is 1 unit, Complex is 2, Advanced is 3, and anything Exceptional is quoted separately. The bands size the work. They are not a delivery date for any single journey.

Functional assurance

Checking that named journeys do what they should. It is the base scope of Cover. Performance, security, accessibility and resilience sit outside it unless separately agreed.

Independent QA

Quality assurance from a team that did not design or build the product it checks. We do not build what we then sign off.

Regression

A change to the system that breaks something that used to work. Map measures what regression costs you on each platform; Cover catches it on the journeys that matter.

Test harness

The checks, the integration that connects them to your pipeline, and the evidence they produce. Pod builds it on a new programme and Cover maintains it once journeys are live. We do not sell it on its own.

Evidence

The record a check leaves behind: what was checked, against which build, what happened, and what was not covered. Every verdict rests on it.

Release candidate

A build intended for production. Our checks run against release candidates in your test environment or in CI, never against production itself.