maintainer-backlog-health

name	maintainer-backlog-health
description	Manage maintainer backlog using age, impact, dependency, contributor expectation, security/release relevance, and capacity instead of letting queues decay invisibly.

Maintainer Backlog Health

Use when this procedure is the primary professional method needed for the assignment.

Procedure

1. Confirm the decision or outcome this work must support, its scope, owner, constraints, and definition of success.
2. Establish the evidence baseline using issues, PRs, release milestones, security/dependency alerts, maintainer capacity, and contributor commitments. Do not fill material gaps with assumptions when they can change the result.
3. Measure open work and response age, group by required decision, close stale/obsolete items with evidence, surface blocked maintainer decisions, and set sustainable service expectations.
4. Exercise realistic edge, failure, transition, or exception cases that could invalidate the result; record unresolved uncertainty explicitly.
5. Validate the output against the original outcome and any neighboring professional contracts so this skill does not silently absorb another specialist's authority.
6. Record the resulting artifact, measurements, decisions, provenance, and handoff information needed for another owner to reproduce or continue the work.

Quality gate

Backlog state reflects current project intent and old items are deliberately resolved rather than abandoned.