validation-contract

name	validation-contract
description	Use when authoring or normalising a specialist skill, or preparing to ship a feature or release — defines the seven evidence categories every specialist skill must declare against and provides the canonical Release Evidence Bundle template. The contract spine that turns scattered validation skills into a coherent ship-readiness check.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["Codex","codex"]}

Validation Contract

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Use When

• Authoring a new specialist skill and deciding which validation evidence it should produce.
• Normalising an older specialist skill against the current house style.
• Preparing a feature or release for ship and assembling the Release Evidence Bundle.
• Reviewing a PR that claims a feature is production-ready.

Do Not Use When

• The work is purely local, experimental, or explicitly throwaway with no path to production.
• The skill being authored is a baseline, process, or pure index skill. Those do not declare evidence.
• The task is unrelated to validation planning or shipping readiness.

Required Inputs

• The specialist skill or feature being validated, including its intended scope and risk tier.
• Access to the repository's existing validation skills (advanced-testing-strategy, vibe-security-skill, observability-monitoring, etc.) as the source of category-specific "how to validate" content.
• Awareness of the 14 canonical artifact templates in skill-composition-standards/references/ so evidence rows can cite existing formats.