Adoption & Evolution · master area
Artifact Lifecycle
A corpus is not a museum. Artifacts go stale. The chain has a small, honest discipline for that — dated, marked, retired, lightweight-tracked.
Owners: PO, Tech Lead Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: Every artifact in the chain is a hedge — but only while it's true.
Where it lives in the chain
- After We Build · Adoption — artifact lifecycle — the canon
The four disciplines
- Every artefact has a
last_revieweddate. The corpus surfaces ones over six months old. Stale artefacts produce stale models. - Deprecated artefacts are marked, not deleted. Future readers need to know the practice was tried and what replaced it. A deleted ADR loses the why we don't do this anymore — and the next team makes the same mistake.
- A lightweight track exists for changes that don't warrant the full chain — typo fixes, documentation tweaks, minor refactors. They go through CI but not through Discovery. The chain accommodates micro-changes without performing ceremony for them.
- The chain itself is reviewed annually. Where is friction structural? Where is the corpus describing a world that has moved?
What good practice looks like
| Trigger | Action |
|---|---|
last_reviewed > 6 months | Surface in monthly chain health read. Owner re-reads, updates date, or marks superseded. |
| Practice replaced | Old artefact marked deprecated: see <new path> — kept, not deleted. |
| One-line copy fix | Lightweight track: PR, CI, merge. No brief, no amigos. |
| Five-line config change with no behaviour shift | Lightweight track, with a smoke test stage. |
| Migration | Full chain. No lightweight bypass — the JWT outage shipped because someone thought a six-line config was lightweight. |
The discipline is deliberate distinction between micro-change and chain-change. A team that runs everything through the full chain produces ceremony. A team that runs everything through the lightweight track produces incidents. The boundary is named in the team's release-gate runbook.
Related crafts
- Knowledge Retention — the why-it-matters
- Chain Evolution — the annual review's other half