Development lifecycle

The nolte-shared skills and agents are designed to cover the full development lifecycle of a project. That span runs from the first mission statement to the released artefact. This page shows where each artefact fits in.

The lifecycle has seven sequential phases plus an eighth, Cross-cutting. The eighth phase collects artefacts whose responsibility is genuinely phase-agnostic. The first seven phases form a loop. At the end of a sprint, the loop returns to Plan to schedule the next sprint. Once the project reaches its minimum viable product (MVP), the loop returns to Vision. The mission is then revised toward stabilisation.

Every skill and agent declares its phase in its frontmatter (phase:). The catalog generator groups the Skills and Agents catalog pages by that field. This page and the catalog stay in lock-step.

Lifecycle phases and their skills and agents

Which skill or agent belongs to which lifecycle phase, and how does the loop return at sprint close and at MVP?

flowchart TD
  subgraph V["1 Vision"]
    mdef[mission-define]
    mrev[mission-revise]
  end
  subgraph P["2 Plan"]
    aid[audience-identify]
    arev["audience-review (A)"]
    rinit[roadmap-init]
    rplan[roadmap-plan]
    rref[roadmap-refine]
    splan[sprint-plan]
    fdec[feature-decompose]
    fcr["feature-consistency-reviewer (A)"]
  end
  subgraph D["3 Design"]
    spec[spec]
    srr["spec-readiness-reviewer (A)"]
    skm[skill-management]
    cpd["claude-plugin-developer (A)"]
    psa[project-structure-apply]
    sac[skill-agent-catalog-apply]
    mks[mkdocs-structure-apply]
    mda[mermaid-diagrams-apply]
    git[github-issue-templates-apply]
    pal[permission-allowlist-maintain]
    ddr[docs-dry-refactor]
    dat[docs-audience-tracks-apply]
    rsa[readme-structure-apply]
    yjs[yaml-json-schema]
    ada["audience-doc-author (A)"]
  end
  subgraph B["4 Build"]
    sex[sprint-execute]
  end
  subgraph R["5 Review"]
    prc[pull-request-create]
    prm[pull-request-merge]
    skr[skill-review]
    agr[agent-review]
  end
  subgraph Q["6 Quality"]
    qg[quality-gate]
    da[dependency-audit]
    pa[portfolio-audit]
    vda[vocab-drift-audit]
    wht[workflow-health-triage]
    dfc["docs-freshness-checker (A)"]
    pvc["prose-vale-curator (A)"]
  end
  subgraph C["7 Close and Release"]
    srev[sprint-review]
    rnc[release-notes-curate]
    rpt[release-publish-trigger]
  end
  subgraph X["8 Cross-cutting"]
    cta["cookiecutter-template-author (A)"]
    pts["png-to-transparent-svg (A)"]
  end
  V --> P
  P --> D
  D --> B
  B --> R
  R --> Q
  Q --> C
  C -. next sprint .-> P
  C -. MVP achieved .-> V

Items marked (A) are agents; every other item is a skill.

Phases

1 Vision

The mission frames the entire effort: who the project serves, what counts as success, when success becomes measurable. This phase is entered once at project bootstrap and revisited at MVP-status transitions.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
mission-define	skill	Author the first project/mission.md once the audience artefact and project/goals.md exist.
mission-revise	skill	Update the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) statement, flip mvp_status along its legal lifecycle, or revise after stabilisation.

2 Plan

Plan turns the mission's outcomes into concrete, sprint-targeted work. Roadmap items decompose into features, features feed sprints. Two agents support this phase. audience-review audits the audience artefact before it underwrites planning. feature-consistency-reviewer is dispatched mid-flow by feature-decompose.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
audience-identify	skill	Establish the bounded context's audience list before any downstream artefact references it. Precondition for mission-define and roadmap-init.
audience-review	agent	Audit an existing audience artefact for completeness before mission, roadmap, or release-notes work depends on it.
roadmap-init	skill	Scaffold project/goals.md and project/roadmap.md the first time.
roadmap-plan	skill	Add, retarget, or reshape roadmap items; flip the MVP flag along the asymmetric rule.
roadmap-refine	skill	Promote items to fine detail before they enter the next or current sprint.
sprint-plan	skill	Open the next sprint file at project/sprints/<NNNN>-<slug>.md and pull in matching roadmap items.
feature-decompose	skill	Decompose a roadmap item into one or more project/features/<slug>.md files.
feature-consistency-reviewer	agent	Dispatched by feature-decompose to audit a draft feature against the feature corpus, source roots, and spec corpus before draft → ready.

3 Design

Design is where conventions, scaffolds, and specifications are written. Specs are the authoritative source for every downstream skill, agent, and contribution. Three agents support this phase: spec-readiness-reviewer for spec gates, claude-plugin-developer for new plugin artefacts, and audience-doc-author for audience-driven documentation drafts.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
spec	skill	Author, translate, deduplicate, or drift-check a multilingual specification under spec/.
spec-readiness-reviewer	agent	Audit a spec for contradictions, audience fit, and domain completeness before promotion.
skill-management	skill	Author or revise a Claude Code skill in the plugin source tree.
claude-plugin-developer	agent	Draft a new plugin skill or agent in strict conformance with every spec under spec/claude/.
project-structure-apply	skill	Audit and scaffold the repository's .github/, Taskfile, MkDocs, Renovate config, and Probot integrations.
skill-agent-catalog-apply	skill	Wire up the MkDocs skill-and-agent catalog so docs surface every artefact.
mkdocs-structure-apply	skill	Audit and scaffold the per-language MkDocs skeleton, plugin baseline, and frontmatter contract.
mermaid-diagrams-apply	skill	Apply the Mermaid-diagrams convention to a doc page.
github-issue-templates-apply	skill	Scaffold or update .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/ Issue Forms for the project's audience.
permission-allowlist-maintain	skill	Curate the committed .claude/settings.json permissions.allow list.
docs-dry-refactor	skill	Detect duplicated MkDocs prose and extract it through mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin.
docs-audience-tracks-apply	skill	Audit and scaffold the documentation-tracks layer: per-page track: frontmatter, required user-/developer-docs content blocks, audience-to-track mapping.
readme-structure-apply	skill	Audit and scaffold README.md against the six-section structure, length budget, link rules.
yaml-json-schema	skill	Author, audit, refactor, and meta-validate YAML-encoded JSON Schema 2020-12 documents.
audience-doc-author	agent	Draft or refine an audience-tailored documentation artefact (README, release notes, MkDocs pages) against an existing audience artefact.

4 Build

A planned sprint becomes active when the first feature starts. Sprint-execute is the daily driver: it transitions feature state and keeps the sprint file's frontmatter in sync with reality.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
sprint-execute	skill	Promote the sprint to active, walk features through ready → in_progress → done, and update last_commit per completion.

5 Review

Code change reaches develop only through a reviewed pull request. Skill and agent artefacts have their own dedicated review skills with persistent review plans under .audits/.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
pull-request-create	skill	Open a draft PR with a Conventional-Commits title and the five-section body. Runs task lint locally before push.
pull-request-merge	skill	Promote the draft to ready, apply labels, trigger automerge, and verify the merge commit landed on develop.
skill-review	skill	Audit a skill against skill-management / skill-vs-agent; emit a persistent review plan.
agent-review	skill	Same shape as skill-review, but for agents.

6 Quality

Quality skills and agents run mostly in CI and pre-push contexts. Several are also invoked ad-hoc when an audit is due. quality-gate is typically called from pull-request-create before push. Two agents support this phase. docs-freshness-checker audits the docs for drift. prose-vale-curator curates prose against the Vale style.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
quality-gate	skill	Run lint, typecheck, and test in parallel before commit, PR, or release.
dependency-audit	skill	Scan the dependency tree for CVEs, optionally license issues; pre-PR or pre-release gate.
portfolio-audit	skill	Audit the cross-repository capability portfolio for duplicates and gaps.
vocab-drift-audit	skill	Diff the local Vale vocabulary against the pinned nolte/vale-style release.
workflow-health-triage	skill	Triage a failing required workflow on develop or main and dispatch the appropriate fix lane.
docs-freshness-checker	agent	Audit MkDocs docs for parity, dead links, stale spec/src references, ADR hygiene, and Mermaid-derived drift.
prose-vale-curator	agent	Curate prose so it passes Vale; in vocabulary-owning repos, extend accept.txt for legitimate technical identifiers.

7 Close and release

A sprint closes by validating its deployable artefact; release skills augment and publish the release notes that release-drafter has been accumulating.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
sprint-review	skill	Validate artifact_ref, confirm the value-verifying acceptance criterion, optionally chain into release skills, then close the sprint.
release-notes-curate	skill	Augment the open release-drafter draft on develop with project-context-aware sections.
release-publish-trigger	skill	Validate every pre-publish gate locally, then dispatch release-publish.yml for the draft.

8 Cross-cutting

Cross-cutting artefacts are phase-agnostic: they're invoked when the situation calls for them, regardless of which lifecycle phase the surrounding work is in. Both current cross-cutting artefacts are agents.

Artefact	Type	When to invoke
cookiecutter-template-author	agent	Scaffold or refactor a cookiecutter template that renders a nolte-spec-conformant project; harden hooks; set up pytest-cookies plus the CI matrix.
png-to-transparent-svg	agent	Convert a PNG with baked-in checkerboard fake transparency into a clean SVG with real alpha transparency.

Cycle return edges

• Close → Plan (next sprint). When a sprint closes, the next sprint is planned (sprint-plan) and the roadmap is refined (roadmap-refine) for items whose target_sprint now points at the upcoming sprint.
• Close → Vision (MVP achieved). When the verifying-feature criterion fires and the mission's mvp_status is ready to advance, mission-revise flips the status along defining → in_progress → achieved → stabilised.

Not covered here

This page is about the project lifecycle; cross-cutting concerns and per-artefact catalog views have their own pages:

• The agent catalog lists every shipped agent, grouped by phase, with the full agent metadata.
• The skill catalog lists every shipped skill, grouped by phase, with the full skill metadata.
• The tag index cross-references skills and agents that declare the same tag.