# Scope — Nova is Downstream of PDLC

> This page is the citizen-developer-facing copy.

## The Boundary

The **Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC)** is **upstream** of Nova. The
PDLC includes:

- Product backlog / roadmap planning
- Code authorship (via AI coding agent, IDE, or agentic SDLC platform)
- Sprint planning / issue tracking
- Application business logic
- IDE workflows / developer experience

Nova never reaches into the PDLC. Nova's domain is **infrastructure +
delivery only**. Nova integrates with externally owned PDLC, SDLC,
Agentic, and Citizen Developer platforms with no regard for the source
of the intent: Nova provides a set of skills and MCP endpoints that help
the developer or AI agent make their application production-grade, and
all intents to deploy to production go through the same rigorous
controls, quality gates, attestation, and evidence stream.

## What Nova Does

Nova governs the downstream half:

- **Contract ingestion** — the validated entry point
- **Submission-readiness gate** — what is acceptable to start
  (`schemas/submission-readiness.schema.json`)
- **Policy enforcement** — the confidence signal, Checkov, tagging
- **Cloud resource lifecycle** — Terraform plan/apply, state, IAM
- **Environment progression** — dev (autonomous) → qa (QA attestation) →
  prod (SRE attestation) → dr (SRE attestation)
- **Immutable audit + attestation** — the Decision Ledger, the evidence
  stream, the HITL gates

## The Integration Point

Integration between the PDLC and Nova is **only** through the validated,
published contract boundary:

```
PDLC (upstream)                         Nova (downstream)
─────────────────                       ─────────────────
product backlog                         contract ingestion
code authorship (AI agent / IDE / SDLC) → submission-readiness gate
sprint planning                         → policy enforcement
application business logic              → cloud resource lifecycle
                                        → environment progression (dev→qa→prod→dr)
                                        → immutable audit + attestation
```

The citizen developer's AI coding agent, an upstream agentic SDLC
platform, or any upstream development platform may all produce
submissions. **The source does not matter** — all are subject to the
same compliance standards. Nova validates the submission, not the
author.

## What Nova is Not

- Not an upstream development platform (no product backlogs, IDE, code
  authorship).
- Not a general-purpose AI agent platform (autonomy is narrow, bounded
  by policy envelopes).
- Not a legacy infrastructure bridge (no VMs/bare metal/OS).
- Not a permissive delivery highway (no escape hatches past confidence
  or HITL).
- Not a mutable audit log (VCS history ≠ regulatory evidence).

These anti-goals (from `docs/vision.md` §7 and Core Tenet #2) are
promoted here from buried tenets to an unmissable scope statement.