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acdl/docs/scope.md
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Jon Chery 9bc37301ba docs(P4): trim word count + purge 'penetrate' repo-wide (REQ-271,272)
Targeted ~20-30% word-count trim on 8 verbose slides (1, 5, 7, 8, 13,
14, 20, appendix). Tables + short slides untouched. Spirit preserved.
Removed 'penetrate' (and derivatives) from docs/scope.md, docs/vision.md,
.ciagent/PROJECT.md, .ciagent/CLARIFY.md, .ciagent/NORTH_STAR.md, and
presentation files (G-001 binding revision). RESEARCH.md/PLAN.md/GRILL.md
exempt as decision-history. Slide 5 'penetrates' phrase removed with no
replacement (slide 4 Anti-Goals already excludes the PDLC).

---ci---
project: acdl
phase: 4
milestone: v1.23
status: execute
phase_role: execution
---/ci---
2026-08-12 00:26:37 +00:00

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Markdown

# 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.