maintaining-artifact-consistency

To align artifacts when truth changes, you trigger ripple updates that propagate changes downstream and upstream across the artifact chain. This maintains a single source of truth and performs traceability checks across framing, shaping, spec, design, implementation, and QA artifacts.

Maintaining traceability across the artifact lifecycle requires updating links and explicit acceptance criteria whenever truth changes. Cross-artifact consistency validation ensures downstream and upstream stages remain aligned during change events.

To resolve conflicts when QA discoveries contradict the spec, the system surfaces contradictions and proposes corrective actions. It suggests downstream changes to design and implementation while flagging the upstream framing artifact for review.

Yes, you can propagate upstream changes to framing and shaping artifacts from a late implementation update. The ripple update mechanism aligns upstream artifacts when truth changes, preventing drift across the entire artifact lifecycle.

To start a ripple update across the artifact chain, you need to provide the changed artifact, the impacted stages, and the current versions. This initiates cross-artifact consistency validation and ripple planning.

Artifact drift occurs when truth changes in one stage but fails to propagate to downstream and upstream artifacts. Cross-artifact consistency validation prevents rework by applying ripple updates to maintain a single source of truth across the lifecycle.