| name | Context Audit |
| description | "Use when a new engineer joins the team, when onboarding to an unfamiliar codebase, or when auditing whether the team has shared understanding. Triggers on "onboard", "context", "knowledge gap", "bus factor", "team understanding"." |
Context Audit
When to invoke
- "New dev joins Monday - what must they know in week 1?"
- "Audit: does the team actually understand why we chose X?"
- "Our bus factor is 1 on the billing module. Fix it."
Goal
Measure shared team understanding, surface single-person knowledge, create a week-1 runway for new joiners.
Audit questions (ask each team member privately)
- Can you draw the system architecture on a whiteboard in 5 minutes?
- What are the 3 most important invariants this system must preserve?
- Where is the riskiest code? Who knows it best?
- What would you never change without senior review? Why?
- Which parts do you personally avoid touching? Why?
If answers diverge significantly, you have a context gap.
Outputs
1. Shared architecture map (1 page)
- Mermaid diagram of services and data flow
- List of external integrations and who owns them
- List of invariants (business rules that must hold)
2. Risk heat map
| Module | Criticality | Bus factor | Last refactor | Owner |
|----------|-------------|------------|----------------|-------|
| billing | high | 1 (Alex) | 2y ago | Alex |
| auth | high | 3 | 6mo ago | team |
Any row with bus factor 1 on a high-criticality module is a P0 action.
3. Week-1 runbook for new joiner
- Day 1: read these 5 ADRs, run the stack locally.
- Day 2: pair with Alex on billing, ship a doc improvement.
- Day 3: shadow on-call rotation.
- Day 4: take a "starter" ticket with paired review.
- Day 5: retro with tech lead. What is still unclear?
Anti-patterns
- "Onboarding is just our READMEs." (Insufficient - READMEs miss tacit knowledge.)
- Week-1 plan with no coding or system operation.
- Zero mention of invariants or failure modes.
- Knowledge only in senior engineers' heads with no documentation trail.
Quality gate
A new engineer should be able to ship a low-risk change by end of week 1 with paired review. If not, the audit failed.
