a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem
"The programmer adopted a simple heuristic that always sorts files by date first, which significantly sped up his search process."
A heuristic method.
"The programmer decided to write a heuristic algorithm to quickly find an approximate solution rather than waiting for the perfect answer."
of or relating to or using a general formulation that serves to guide investigation
"The researcher relied on a simple heuristic to quickly narrow down the thousands of potential leads for their study."
That employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect; not following or derived from any theory.
"The developer implemented a heuristic algorithm to quickly find a good enough solution for the complex routing problem without waiting for an exhaustive search that was taking too long."