Glossary

This page defines key terms used in ***plain and serves as a quick reference while reading the language guide.

Acceptance test is a specific, observable check written by developer that defines how a particular aspect of functionality should be tested and validated.

Concept is a domain entity, artifact, or shared reference that other requirements can point to. In ***plain the concepts should be expressed using :Concept: notation.

Conformance tests are automatically generated from the specifications. They check whether the implementation matches the specification.

Definitions declare named concepts that the rest of the specification can refer to. Definitions are the shared domain model and vocabulary for the specification.

Functional specs describe what the software must do. These are the behavioral requirements of the system.

Implementation reqs describe how the software should be implemented or constrained. These are non-functional requirements and implementation constraints such as language, framework, file naming, architecture, or coding rules.

Renderer is a tool that creates a working software from a ***plain specification.

Test reqs describe how conformance tests should be generated, structured, and executed. These are testing constraints for the spec-compliance test suite, not requirements for the implementation code itself.

Unit tests are automatically generated by the renderer to verify individual parts of the implementation code. These are the fine-grained tests for functions, classes, or modules.