Checklists

requirements.md

Specification Quality Checklist: Responsive Pre-Review Gate Operator Flow

Purpose: Validate specification completeness and quality before proceeding to planning Created: 2026-08-23 Mission: spec.md

Content Quality

  • ✅ No implementation architecture is prescribed
  • ✅ Focused on operator value and workflow integrity
  • ✅ Written for maintainers, operators, and automation authors
  • ✅ All mandatory sections completed

Requirement Completeness

  • ✅ No [NEEDS CLARIFICATION] markers remain
  • ✅ Requirements are testable and unambiguous
  • ✅ Requirement types are separated
  • ✅ IDs are unique across FR, NFR, and constraint entries
  • ✅ All requirement rows include a non-empty status
  • ✅ Non-functional requirements include measurable thresholds
  • ✅ Success criteria are measurable
  • ✅ Success criteria describe observable outcomes rather than implementation architecture
  • ✅ All acceptance scenarios are defined
  • ✅ Edge cases are identified
  • ✅ Scope is clearly bounded
  • ✅ Dependencies and assumptions are identified

Mission Readiness

  • ✅ All functional requirements have clear acceptance evidence
  • ✅ User scenarios cover primary, recovery, and policy flows
  • ✅ The Mission meets measurable outcomes defined in Success Criteria
  • ✅ Existing partial remediation is treated as a claim to verify
  • ✅ Asynchronous redesign is explicitly excluded
  • ✅ Remaining public-entry heartbeat and oversized-scope work is distinguished from landed behavior
  • ✅ Structured-output and interruption guarantees are physically achievable and bounded
  • ✅ Unknown-budget timeout evidence is actionable without introducing automatic runtime classification
  • ✅ Retrospective follow-through explicitly reviews classification candidates

Validation Notes

  • Discovery decisions were resolved with no deferred items or stale markers.
  • The ratified policy is atomic-by-default gate execution with an explicit visible skip, while newly detected regressions remain warn-by-default unless a project opts into blocking.
  • The specification deliberately distinguishes timeout/cancellation from a completed regression verdict.
  • Post-spec adversarial review found and the revision resolved: undefined structured progress, impossible hard-kill cleanup, incomplete control precedence, fakeable test mapping, and omission of the 8/8 timeout plus oversized-scope evidence.
  • Human mode requires continuing heartbeat output through the exact public entry point; structured mode preserves one final JSON document with final gate metadata.
  • Oversized scopes refuse promptly with explicit skip or bounded-scope guidance and never become an automatic skip.
  • Unknown-budget timeouts emit classification-candidate diagnostics, while deterministic metadata changes remain explicit and reviewable; the Mission/sprint retrospective must inspect that evidence and assign follow-up or record no action.
  • Post-spec adversarial review is complete; ready for /spec-kitty.plan once the specification commit boundary passes.