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Spec Delivery Goals Roadmap Readiness

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Joseph Roberts edited this page Oct 18, 2026 · 5 revisions
  • Status: Delivered Delivery Goals and readiness contract; completed RR-R10 is not an active assignment
  • Approved in conversation: 2026-08-29
  • Governing delivery phase: release-radar-post-mvp-remediation
  • Governing ticket: RR-R10
  • Target store migration: additive schema version 11

Complete outcome

Release Radar will add first-class, phase-scoped Delivery Goals; prevent a phase from being treated as ready while upcoming work is missing, duplicated, or attached only to an incomplete label; and repair RR-ROADMAP (Established product roadmap) so all 11 upcoming tickets belong to exactly one approved, complete outcome. Delivery Goals remain separate from observed Codex execution goals. The complete outcome includes migration, typed mutations, all ticket- writer enforcement, Phase Board presentation, installed-state repair, independent verification, owner acceptance, per-task commit/push checkpoints, and terminal remote verification.

Bounded delivery chunks are feedback and verification checkpoints under this one outcome. They do not reduce the feature or redefine completion as the least possible release.

Controlling references

The existing five-lane Phase Board and its card vocabulary remain the visual baseline. The existing Goals studies describe observed Codex execution goals; they do not authorize conflating those observations with the new app-owned Delivery Goals.

Scope

In scope

  • App-owned Delivery Goals scoped to one project phase.
  • A phase-plan readiness state and structural revision.
  • Exactly-zero-or-one Delivery Goal per ticket while drafting and exactly one qualifying Delivery Goal per upcoming ticket when a phase is Ready.
  • Complete outcome text and measurable done criteria for each Delivery Goal.
  • Goal lifecycle, audit, Activity, error, replay, migration, and recovery semantics.
  • Central enforcement across every ticket writer, including bridge commands, owner actions, importers, seed/sample paths, and test/debug writers.
  • Non-mutating phase browsing and Delivery Goal coverage on Phase Board.
  • Explicit separation from observed_goals and ticket_goal_links.
  • One-time RR-R10 bootstrap and exact six-goal repair of RR-ROADMAP.
  • Archive-v1 protection against silently omitting Delivery Goals.

Out of scope

  • A sixth delivery lane or automatic lane changes from dependencies or Codex observations.
  • Repository Markdown as a runtime planning authority.
  • A generalized workflow engine, cloud backend, or direct SQLite access.
  • A writable global Goals screen.
  • Implementing the 11 roadmap tickets themselves.
  • A portable archive v2; this work only adds the v1 loss-prevention guard and leaves v2 as a separately approved future outcome.

Vocabulary and authority

Delivery Goal

An app-owned outcome contract for one phase. It explains why a group of tickets exists and the conditions that make the group complete. One Delivery Goal may own many tickets. A ticket may belong to at most one Delivery Goal.

Codex execution goal

An observed or explicitly linked Codex runtime identity stored through the existing observed_goals and ticket_goal_links model. It is last-known execution context, not plan membership or readiness authority.

Phase plan

The app-owned structural record that says whether one phase's upcoming work has been assessed and whether its current goal/ticket structure is complete. Phase-plan readiness is distinct from lane state, dependency eligibility, blockers, goal lifecycle, and the project's persisted active-phase pointer.

Data model

Schema version 11 adds, without rewriting existing records:

phase_plans

Field Contract
project_id, phase_id Composite identity; phase ownership is enforced.
state legacy_unassessed, draft, or ready.
revision Monotonic structural revision used for optimistic concurrency.
ready_revision The revision most recently finalized; null unless Ready.
timestamps Created, structurally updated, and finalized timestamps.

delivery_goals

Field Contract
id Stable project-local identity.
project_id, phase_id Immutable owning phase.
title Concise owner-visible name.
outcome Complete user/product outcome, not a task label.
done_criteria Ordered, nonempty measurable criteria.
lifecycle draft, planned, active, awaiting_acceptance, accepted, or superseded.
sort_order Stable owner-visible ordering within the phase.
timestamps Created, updated, activated, and accepted timestamps as applicable.

delivery_goal_ticket_assignments

  • Stores one exact project/phase/goal/ticket relationship.
  • Enforces UNIQUE(project_id, ticket_id).
  • Enforces same-project and same-phase ownership through composite foreign keys.
  • Never infers membership from dependencies, text, threads, or observed goals.

delivery_goal_assignment_events

  • Links the one store-owned phase-plan audit event to every ticket assigned, unassigned, or reassigned by that structural revision.
  • Records project, phase, ticket, previous/current goal, action, and resulting revision; it is attribution/history, not a second mutation authority.
  • Uses a deferred audit-event foreign key so the transaction may write the links before DeliveryStore inserts its one authoritative audit event.

Existing observed_goals and ticket_goal_links remain byte-semantically and contractually unchanged. Migration does not copy, reinterpret, or relabel them.

Phase-plan state machine

legacy_unassessed ──open/revise──> draft ──finalize──> ready
                                      ^                  |
                                      └──structural edit─┘
  • Legacy unassessed is assigned once to every existing phase at v11 migration. It says no Delivery Goal assessment has been recorded.
  • Draft permits zero-or-one Delivery Goal per ticket and incomplete goal definitions. It is browsable but does not authorize starting Backlog work.
  • Ready is a validated structural claim at one exact revision.
  • Any structural goal, assignment, ticket creation/deletion/outcome, or ticket phase-membership change increments the affected plan revision and atomically returns Ready to Draft.
  • Lane movement, blockers, dependencies, evidence, audit, notifications, and valid Delivery Goal lifecycle progress do not change structural revision.

Ready invariant

Finalization rejects a phase with zero upcoming tickets. Otherwise it succeeds only when all of the following are true in one transaction:

  1. The phase has at least one non-superseded Delivery Goal.
  2. Every non-superseded goal has a title, complete outcome, at least one measurable done criterion, and at least one assigned ticket.
  3. Every upcoming ticket in the phase has exactly one assignment to a non-superseded goal. An upcoming ticket is any ticket not in Accepted.
  4. No assignment crosses a project or phase boundary.
  5. Every complete Draft goal is promotable to Planned; finalization performs those promotions first, then verifies that no upcoming ticket remains assigned to a Draft, Accepted, or Superseded goal in the committed Ready state.
  6. No goal or assignment operation is internally contradictory.

Open blockers and unsatisfied dependencies do not make a structurally complete plan incomplete. They continue to control delivery eligibility through their existing contracts.

Accepted legacy tickets are historical delivery evidence and are excluded from the upcoming-ticket coverage invariant. The app must not invent goals for them.

After a valid Ready phase delivers all of its assigned tickets into Accepted, it remains Ready at the same structural revision with zero upcoming and zero unassigned tickets. That completed state is distinct from attempting to finalize an initially empty phase and is presented as completed delivery, not as an invalid 0/0 readiness claim.

Delivery Goal lifecycle

draft ──phase finalize──> planned ──first work starts──> active
active ──all tickets accepted + request──> awaiting_acceptance
awaiting_acceptance ──new rework ticket starts──> active
awaiting_acceptance ──owner acceptance──> accepted
draft/planned ──bounded structural replacement──> superseded
  • Finalizing a phase atomically changes its remaining Draft goals to Planned.
  • Starting the first assigned ticket atomically changes Planned to Active. This is an app-owned formal delivery action, never an inference from Codex state.
  • Active may enter Awaiting acceptance only when every assigned ticket is Accepted and no required acceptance evidence is missing.
  • Awaiting acceptance returns to Active only when owner-directed rework is represented by a new Backlog ticket, the revised phase plan is finalized, and that new ticket starts. An Accepted ticket is never reopened.
  • Accepted requires explicit owner acceptance recorded through the typed command path. Accepted is terminal; later defects require new remediation work rather than rewriting accepted history.
  • Superseded is terminal. Only Draft or Planned goals whose assigned tickets have not started may be superseded, and every assignment must be removed or transferred atomically in the same structural revision.
  • Active and Awaiting-acceptance goals cannot be superseded.
  • Accepted or Superseded goal definitions cannot be edited. An assignment for a started or Accepted ticket cannot be removed or transferred. Draft promotion, first-work activation, and supersession cannot be requested as freestanding lifecycle changes; they remain coupled to finalization, ticket start, and structural revision respectively.

Ticket-writer enforcement

All ticket mutations pass through one store-owned validation path. No bridge, owner UI, importer, seed/sample helper, or test/debug writer may bypass it.

Operation Required behavior
Create a ticket in a phase Create in Backlog only; structurally invalidate a Ready plan.
Move a ticket between phases Only a Backlog ticket may move; it remains Backlog; both affected plans are structurally revised.
Start Backlog work Require Ready at the current revision, exactly one actionable goal, and existing dependency/blocker eligibility. Planned and Active are actionable. Awaiting acceptance is actionable only for a new owner-directed rework ticket and returns to Active atomically when that ticket starts.
Backlog directly to Needs review or Accepted Reject; these lanes cannot bypass starting-work validation.
Backlog directly to Blocked Allow; this transition does not start work, activate a Delivery Goal or phase, or create execution history. To record a meaningful blocker reason, use the existing typed blocker operation before the typed audited lane transition.
In progress/Needs review movement Preserve existing formal transition rules; assignments remain required for post-v11 work.
Blocked to active work Require Ready and exactly one actionable goal; Blocked is not a readiness bypass.
Return to Backlog Allow where existing policy permits; any legacy continuation exemption is permanently lost.
Completion/review record for unstarted Backlog Reject.
Create or phase-move directly into an active or Accepted lane Reject.
Move an Accepted ticket to another lane Reject. Accepted tickets are terminal and are never reopened.
Work under an Accepted goal Reject; create separately governed remediation work.

Starting or resuming work also requires zero unresolved blockers on the ticket, every ticket dependency in Accepted, and every phase dependency satisfied by all tickets in the prerequisite phase being Accepted. Failure changes no lane, goal lifecycle, audit, request receipt, or notification occurrence.

Owner-rejected goal acceptance and later defects are represented by a new Backlog ticket. The new ticket structurally revises the phase plan, receives exactly one Delivery Goal assignment, and passes the normal Ready gate before work starts. Historical Accepted tickets remain unchanged.

Legacy continuation rule

At v11 migration only, existing In progress and Needs review tickets may continue to completion without invented Delivery Goal assignments. If one of those tickets returns to Backlog, it cannot restart until its phase is Ready and it has exactly one qualifying assignment. Existing Blocked tickets do not receive the continuation exemption. Existing Accepted tickets remain immutable legacy-completed history.

Typed mutation contract

Apply a phase-plan revision

One bounded, transactional command accepts:

  • version, requestID, exact project root, task attribution, and reason;
  • projectID, phaseID, and expectedRevision;
  • explicit goal upserts;
  • explicit ticket assignments and unassignments; and
  • explicit goal supersessions.

Limits are 64 total goal operations (goal upserts + supersessions), 512 total assignment operations (assignments + unassignments), and 65,536 bytes for the sorted-key JSON encoding of the AgentCommand value before it enters the XPC envelope. Omitted arrays mean no operation; omission never deletes or supersedes. A command with no operations rejects without audit or receipt. A successful structural change increments revision exactly once and leaves the phase in Draft. Invalid, cross-phase, over-limit, or stale-revision requests change nothing.

Finalize a phase plan

A separate command takes the exact expectedRevision, validates the full Ready invariant, changes remaining Draft goals to Planned, records ready_revision, and changes the phase to Ready atomically. It returns an actionable list of unassigned tickets, incomplete goals, or conflicting assignments when validation fails.

Goal lifecycle commands

Lifecycle changes use typed commands carrying phaseID and expectedPlanRevision. They validate the transition matrix, assigned-ticket states, a Ready plan whose ready_revision equals that current structural revision, and audit attribution without incrementing that revision. Draft-to-Planned occurs only during finalization; Planned-to-Active occurs only with the first governed ticket start; and supersession occurs only in an atomic structural revision. An external agent may request Awaiting acceptance after all child tickets are Accepted, but only an owner-app-origin command may accept a Delivery Goal. They never change a formal ticket lane merely because the goal lifecycle changed.

Replay and failure behavior

  • The existing durable request receipt owns idempotency.
  • Replaying the same requestID and byte-equivalent command returns the same entity and audit result without another mutation.
  • Reusing a request ID with different content fails closed.
  • A stale expectedRevision returns the current revision and changes nothing.
  • Transaction failure rolls back goals, assignments, plan state, ticket state, request receipt, and audit together.
  • outcomeUnknown is recovered only by replaying the complete original request.

Named error categories include phasePlanIncomplete, planRevisionConflict, ticketGoalRequired, goalPhaseMismatch, goalNotActionable, invalidGoalTransition, and archiveVersionCannotRepresentDeliveryGoals.

Migration and archive behavior

  • Migration to v11 creates one legacy_unassessed phase-plan row per existing phase at revision 0.
  • It creates no Delivery Goals and no assignments from prose, dependencies, Codex links, audit history, or lane state.
  • It preserves all existing tickets, phases, lane states, observed goals, exact ticket/Codex-goal links, dependencies, blockers, audits, and request receipts.
  • Portable archive v1 import creates no Delivery Goals and marks imported phases Legacy unassessed. Because continuation is migration-only, every imported ticket is created in Backlog; a source lane other than Backlog is preserved as an explicit import-review item for owner reconciliation rather than becoming a readiness bypass.
  • Portable archive v1 export must fail with archiveVersionCannotRepresentDeliveryGoals when the project contains any Delivery Goal, assignment, or non-legacy plan state. It must never silently omit the new structure.
  • Archive v2 is future work requiring separate design and approval.

Phase Board experience

The board retains exactly Backlog, In progress, Needs review, Blocked, and Accepted. It adds planning context without turning plan state into a lane.

release_radar / Established product roadmap
Viewed phase [Established product roadmap ▾]   Active phase: Post-MVP remediation
Plan: Ready · revision 3 · 11/11 upcoming tickets covered · 0 unassigned
Delivery Goal [All goals ▾]   [Show unassigned]

Backlog        In progress        Needs review        Blocked        Accepted
[ticket cards using the existing visual and density contract]

Selected ticket
Delivery Goal       RR-DG2 · Portable project continuity · Planned
Codex execution     No linked Codex execution goal
Dependencies        ...
Owner attention     ...
Evidence / Audit    ...
  • Viewed phase is a navigation-only selection and never mutates the persisted active phase.
  • The current active phase remains visibly identified. Existing authorized Make active phase behavior remains a separate, explicit action governed by ADR-003.
  • Plan state, revision, coverage, and unassigned counts are always scoped to the viewed phase.
  • Delivery Goal filtering preserves all five lanes and makes membership visible without moving cards.
  • Draft and Legacy unassessed show an explicit warning and identify which Backlog tickets cannot start.
  • The ticket inspector uses separate headings Delivery Goal and Codex execution goal. Neither may be displayed under a generic ambiguous GOAL CONTEXT heading.
  • Existing responsive density behavior remains. New controls must remain keyboard reachable, VoiceOver labelled, and truthful at compact widths.
  • The global Goals surface continues to present Codex execution observations until a separately approved information-architecture change replaces it.

Activity, owner attention, and notifications

  • Successful plan revisions, finalization, goal lifecycle changes, and assignment changes create project/phase/ticket-attributed audit and Activity entries with the originating task when available.
  • One phase-plan audit remains the authoritative mutation event. Assignment- event links make that same audit/revision discoverable from every affected ticket without generating duplicate audit events.
  • Failed validation creates no partial delivery state or success audit.
  • Awaiting Delivery Goal acceptance creates explicit owner attention through the existing review inbox projection. Its Accept action dispatches through the existing ownerApp origin; the MCP surface cannot assert owner acceptance.
  • Plan-state changes and Delivery Goal lifecycle changes do not masquerade as observed Codex events and do not generate a Codex goal blocked Pushover.
  • Existing notification behavior for a genuinely observed linked Codex goal entering Blocked remains unchanged.

Verification and acceptance

Implementation is not complete until independent roles verify:

  • v10-to-v11 migration, foreign keys, uniqueness, rollback, and replay;
  • both state machines, every allowed/rejected transition, and the invariant that Accepted tickets are never reopened;
  • every ticket-writer path, including upsertTicket, bridge commands, owner actions, seed/sample/debug paths, portable import, and phase movement;
  • the legacy In progress/Needs review exception and the non-exempt Blocked and Backlog cases;
  • stale revision, mismatched phase, duplicate assignment, incomplete goal, oversized request, and outcome-unknown recovery;
  • archive-v1 import behavior and export loss-prevention;
  • observed Codex goal storage, display, linking, and notification preservation;
  • five-lane Phase Board behavior, non-mutating viewed phase, active-phase separation, filters, compact density, keyboard access, VoiceOver, error and empty states, and relaunch persistence;
  • exact RR-R10 bootstrap and exact six-goal RR-ROADMAP repair;
  • installed application build/sign/install/launch/relaunch behavior.

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