Glossary

The acronyms and terms that show up across these engineering docs, defined once. When a doc uses a term from this list without expanding it, this is where to look it up.

Term	Definition
ADR	Architecture Decision Record — a short, dated document capturing one technical decision: its context, the decision itself, and the consequences accepted. See Technical Decision-Making.
ATO	Authority to Operate — a formal authorization that a system meets the required security controls (commonly NIST 800-53) and may run in production.
CVA	Class Variance Authority — the cva() helper used to build component class-name variants instead of stacking conditional className ternaries.
DS	Design system — the shared component library and tokens (@dmwd-io/design-system) that consuming apps build on.
GitOps	An operating model where the desired state of a system lives in Git and an automated process reconciles the running system to match, so every change is a reviewed, revertible commit.
IC	Incident Commander — the person who runs an incident: declares priority, assigns roles, and drives to resolution without touching the keyboard. See Incident Response.
MDX	Markdown extended with JSX — the format these docs are authored in, allowing components to be embedded in Markdown content.
PIR	Post-Incident Review — the blameless review held after a significant incident to find contributing factors and assign action items, examining systems and process rather than people.
RFC	Request for Comments — a short proposal circulated with a fixed comment window so a cross-cutting decision is made with objections heard on the record.
SLO	Service Level Objective — the target for a service-level indicator over a window (for example, “99.5% of requests succeed over 30 days”), the threshold that defines “bad.” See Observability.
WCAG	Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — the accessibility standard the design system targets (WCAG 2.2 AA as the minimum).