Knowledge organized by the lifecycle of a software project, from idea to evolution. Each document describes one problem and the approaches that address it.
- practices/ — lifecycle practice documents (numbered 001-017). One problem per document.
- methods/ — detailed specifications for specific quality methods referenced from the practices.
This is not a sequential book. The numbering in
practices/ follows a typical project's order of
appearance but is not a required path:
- A new project starts near 003-problem-definition.md — defining what to build.
- A project with running code may enter at 009-observability.md — seeing what happens at runtime — or 010-quality.md — trusting what is delivered.
- A live product loops through 014-evolution.md back to 003-problem-definition.md when something needs to change.
Documents describe problems, not stages. When a problem appears in your project, read the document that covers it.
- 001-problem.md — the acceleration gap and why this practice system exists.
- 002-principles.md — principles guiding documentation, instructions, and verification.
- 003-problem-definition.md — capturing intent, scope, non-goals, success.
- 004-project-structure.md — repository layout, naming, organization.
- 005-documentation.md — knowledge that persists across sessions.
- 006-coding-standards.md — enforceable conventions.
- 007-ai-instructions.md — instruction files loaded by AI tools.
- 008-tools.md — formatters, linters, analyzers, build rules.
- 009-observability.md — traces, metrics, logs.
- 010-quality.md — tests, journey verification, trace analysis.
- 011-automation.md — CI, hooks, gates.
- 012-delivery.md — release process, versioning, deployment.
- 013-operation.md — monitoring, incidents, support.
- 014-evolution.md — feedback loops, when to revisit earlier documents.
Detailed specifications for specific quality methods referenced from the practices.
- methods/journey-verification/ -- walking a system through defined user journeys on the callable surface and evaluating each step against binary criteria.
- methods/trace-analyzer/ -- analyzing distributed traces against budgets.
- methods/observability-signals/ -- reference tables for trace, log, and metric findings during development-time verification.