Checklists

requirements.md

Specification Quality Checklist: Excise Doctrine Curation and Inline References

Purpose: Validate specification completeness and quality before proceeding to planning Created: 2026-04-14 Feature: Link to spec.md

Content Quality

  • ✅ No implementation details (languages, frameworks, APIs)
  • Note: This is a deletion/refactor tranche in an existing Python codebase. The spec necessarily names Python modules, YAML files, and CLI commands because those are the user-visible surfaces being removed. That is authorial fidelity, not implementation leakage.
  • ✅ Focused on user value and business needs (contributors, agent integrators, operators)
  • ✅ Written for non-technical stakeholders — sections for users affected, scenarios, and success criteria are readable without Python knowledge; deep file-cluster details are confined to the Implementation Plan section that is explicitly for plan-phase sizing.
  • ✅ All mandatory sections completed

Requirement Completeness

  • ✅ No [NEEDS CLARIFICATION] markers remain
  • ✅ Requirements are testable and unambiguous
  • ✅ Requirement types are separated (Functional / Non-Functional / Constraints)
  • ✅ IDs are unique across FR-### (FR-001 through FR-016), NFR-### (NFR-001 through NFR-004), and C-### (C-001 through C-007) entries
  • ✅ All requirement rows include a non-empty Status value ("Draft" or "Active")
  • ✅ Non-functional requirements include measurable thresholds (≤5% runtime regression, 100% byte match, 0 type errors + ≥90% coverage, 0 stray occurrences)
  • ✅ Success criteria are measurable (11 verifiable post-merge assertions including greppable absence checks)
  • ✅ Success criteria are technology-agnostic (phrased as observable end-state conditions, not implementation recipes)
  • Note: Greppable absence of specific strings is technology-agnostic in the sense required — it is a verifiable post-condition, not a dictated implementation approach.
  • ✅ All acceptance scenarios are defined (5 scenarios covering contributor authoring, operator CLI invocation, runtime context assembly, overlay validation, test suite run)
  • ✅ Edge cases are identified (project overlays with _proposed/, inline-ref re-introduction attempts, downstream include_proposed breakage, dangling graph edges)
  • ✅ Scope is clearly bounded (Goals + Non-Goals + Out of Scope sections all explicit; defers Phase 2+ work to their tracking issues)
  • ✅ Dependencies and assumptions identified (Assumptions section enumerates Phase 0 parity assumption, graph completeness, five-call-site inventory, and compiler/resolver audit)

Feature Readiness

  • ✅ All functional requirements have clear acceptance criteria (every FR maps to a Success Criterion and/or automated test in the Validation section)
  • ✅ User scenarios cover primary flows (author, invoke CLI, runtime context, overlay load, test run)
  • ✅ Feature meets measurable outcomes defined in Success Criteria
  • ✅ No implementation details leak into specification beyond the necessary authorial fidelity noted above (scope is authorial enumeration of surfaces to excise, not prescriptive implementation steps)

Notes

  • Items marked incomplete require spec updates before /spec-kitty.plan
  • All items pass on first validation iteration
  • The spec inherits the authoritative scope from GitHub issues #461 / #463 / #476 / #477 / #475; per constraint C-003, any drift between this spec and those issues must be resolved in favor of the issues
  • The #393 guardrail pattern (constraint C-002) is the load-bearing safety mechanism; plan phase must preserve occurrence-classification artifacts per WP