stainsby/papi-sdlc-task-charter-audit

SDLC Task - Charter Audit

Purpose

A charter audit is a task that checks alignment between the project's Charter and its user stories — in both directions.

It asks two questions:

1. Does the story corpus, taken as a whole, pull the project toward the Charter (its Purpose, Vision, Ethos, Scope, and Success indicators)?
2. Does every story fit somewhere under the Charter — or is some story off-Charter (scope creep, ethos violation, or a sign the Charter itself has drifted)?

The output is a findings list with a disposition for each finding: update the stories, update the Charter, or accept-with-note.

This needs the PAPI long task skill.

What this audit is and is not

This audit:

• Examines alignment of intent (Charter) against story-level work (user stories).
• May recommend changes to the Charter as well as changes to the stories. The Charter is not assumed correct — it is one side of the comparison, not the reference. If reality has moved past the Charter, the audit should say so.
• Does NOT write code or execute anything (tests, demos, pipelines).

Two phases are mandatory

Before the two phases, the audit MUST run a lightweight structural pre-pass:

• Pre-pass — Template conformance: check the Charter file against the current papi-sdlc-charter charter-template.md. Record any structural drift (missing sections, renamed fields, stale guidance, undocumented additions) as findings with a disposition: update document / update template / accept with note. This pass separates "format outdated" from "content wrong" before Phase A goes deeper.

A charter audit MUST then run in two directions and reconcile the results:

• Phase A — Top-down (Charter → stories): for each section of the Charter, ask whether the current story corpus pulls toward it. Record findings as: covered / partial / missing / contradicted.

  Note: this is coverage and direction, not 1:1 item matching. The Charter does not enumerate stories; it sets the destination and the way of working. Phase A asks whether the stories are heading there and behaving accordingly.

• Phase B — Bottom-up (stories → Charter): for each story (or coherent group of stories), identify which part(s) of the Charter it serves. Stories that don't fit anywhere are orphan candidates.

  An orphan candidate is one of three kinds:

  • scope creep — the story is outside the Charter's Scope
  • ethos violation — the story would have us work in a way the Ethos rules out
  • Charter-drift signal — the story is reasonable work, but the Charter no longer describes the project the stories are building

• Phase C — Reconciliation: merge Phase A gaps and Phase B orphan candidates into a single findings list. For each finding, record the agreed disposition:

  • Update stories (add, change, or remove)
  • Update Charter (the Charter needs to catch up to reality, or was wrong)
  • Accept with note (a deliberate, recorded exception)

Running only Phase A is a CRITICAL FAILURE: it lets unaligned work hide. Both phases must be evidenced in the report.

Orphan candidate handling

Every Phase B orphan candidate MUST be brought to the user for a disposition decision before the audit closes. Do NOT auto-classify a story as scope creep, ethos violation, or Charter-drift — the choice between those is a strategic call that belongs with the user.

When to run

Run a charter audit:

• Once early in the project, after the Charter and a first cut of stories both exist.
• Once per release (or at a similar cadence).
• Whenever the story set shifts substantially (large story additions, scope expansion, pivot).
• Whenever someone suspects the Charter no longer describes the project.

Dependencies

Reading these skills is REQUIRED to understand and execute this skill:

• PAPI skill papi-tasks-understand
• PAPI skill papi-templates-understand
• PAPI skill papi-sdlc-charter
• PAPI skill papi-sdlc-user-stories

Actions

• Read the project's Charter and the user-stories index (and each story as needed).
• Copy the default audit template (see below) verbatim and edit it section by section.
• For Phase A, work through each Charter section in turn and record findings against the story corpus.
• For Phase B, work through each story (or coherent group of stories) and record which Charter section(s) it serves. Anything that fits nowhere goes to the orphan candidates table.
• Bring all orphan candidates to the user for disposition before closing the audit.
• For each Phase C finding, record the agreed disposition (update stories / update Charter / accept with note) and follow-on actions.

Notes

• A Charter audit can legitimately recommend that the Charter itself be updated. The Charter is not a reference document for this audit; it is one side of the comparison. Treat both sides with equal scrutiny.
• Generally this is a full audit unless otherwise specified. Do not read older charter audit docs to work incrementally — start fresh.

Skill artefacts

• Default audit template: assets/charter-audit-task-template.md