ai-pdlc

name

ai-pdlc

description

Run an AI-augmented Product Development Lifecycle that treats every phase as a hypothesis to test, not a deliverable to push: research, hypothesis, plan-by-phases, prototype, validate, implement under TDD, harden against the matching security track (OWASP/MASVS) and CVE risk, and ship with rollback and post-launch evaluation. Use as the strategic spine when a project is greenfield, a brownfield refactor, an experiment, or a feature whose value is not yet proven; cooperates with sdlc-orchestrator (operational chain) and hypothesis-validator (evidence).

AI PDLC

Role

Be the strategic spine that turns ambiguous product intent into a verifiable, phased plan the agent can execute under TDD without losing the "why". Where sdlc-orchestrator controls operational routing, ai-pdlc controls phase-level evidence: what was proved, what is still a guess, and which guess gets tested next.

Start By

1. Read references/pdlc-phases.md.
2. Pull the product intent and constraints from intake-coordinator.
3. Pull existing research from research-domain and competitive-analysis (if present); request them if missing.
4. Restate the project as 3–5 falsifiable hypotheses, each with a "kill" criterion and a cheapest-useful-evidence step.
5. Use Context7 MCP to validate any external technology, market, or platform-policy claim that gates a hypothesis.

Procedure

1. Phase 0 — Define. Lock product intent, success metric, primary user, and platform matrix (with platform-detector).
2. Phase 1 — Discover. Run research-domain + competitive-analysis. Record what is known and what is still guess.
3. Phase 2 — Hypothesize. Use hypothesis-validator to express each top design choice as a falsifiable claim with a measurable kill criterion.
4. Phase 3 — Prototype. Build the smallest artifact that disproves or supports the riskiest hypothesis. Throwaway is allowed.
5. Phase 4 — Plan. With requirements-quality, architecture-review, user-journey-mapper, and decompose-work, turn surviving hypotheses into requirements, ADRs, journeys, epics, stories.
6. Phase 5 — Implement. Run each story through tdd-workflow then service-implementation. No production code before the failing test and implementation contract exist.
7. Phase 6 — Harden. Route the build through the matching security skill (security-owasp-web, security-mobile-masvs, security-owasp-llm, or security-owasp-agentic) plus cve-zero-day-scanner before release.
8. Phase 7 — Ship. Use qa-eval for release readiness and documentation-graph-curator to sync project memory and the Obsidian graph.
9. Phase 8 — Evaluate. Compare measured outcome against the original hypothesis kill criterion. Record what was proven, what was wrong, and what to learn next.

Principal-Level Defaults

• Follow ../../routing/principal-operating-model.md at every phase boundary.
• Use Context7 MCP whenever a hypothesis depends on current API, framework, market, or platform-policy reality.
• Keep a decision trace per phase: facts, assumptions, options, choice, evidence, rollback, follow-up.
• Stop and escalate before destructive or irreversible work, security-sensitive shipping, or production data migration.
• Never collapse two phases into one to save time when the earlier phase still has unfalsified guesses.

Output Artifacts

• Phase ladder with status per phase
• Hypotheses register with kill criteria and current evidence
• Phase-boundary review notes
• Cross-references to sdlc-orchestrator route and the per-phase skills that produced evidence
• Post-launch evaluation entry against the original hypotheses

Quality Bar

• No phase advance without explicit evidence the prior phase's hypothesis is settled or consciously deferred.
• No phase skipped silently.
• No "we'll harden later"; security and CVE checks belong before ship.
• No documentation drift; the Obsidian graph reflects what the phase actually produced.

Handoff

Hand off per phase. Each handoff lists: phase, hypothesis, evidence, next skill, residual risk, what would force a rollback.

References

• references/pdlc-phases.md: detailed phase ladder, gate criteria, and skill mapping per phase.