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adr-heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle

Decision

Promote heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle to an authoritative global architectural pattern establishing an evidence-driven knowledge promotion pipeline.

Context

  • Source: governance-flow
  • Pattern: heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle
  • Promotion Recommendation: recommendation-heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle
  • Scope Classification: global
  • Scope Classification Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Without an evidence-driven lifecycle, autonomous agents and engineering teams risk promoting unverified codebase heuristics into global standards, creating architectural drift and premature codification.

Scope

Applicability: Global application across all repository architecture evolution workflows, governance loops, and pattern lifecycle stages.

Enforces formal staged progression (Signal -> Learnings -> Heuristic -> Pattern) for all architectural practices.

Consequences

Governance

Institutionalises mandatory evidence-driven gating before practices can be elevated to enterprise standards.

Execution

Standardises template progression, promotion decision capture, and ADR generation across CAS runner pipelines.

System Behaviour

Prevents unvalidated patterns and heuristics from propagating into global steering projections and active architecture states.

Evidence Summary

Promotion Evidence

Documented in cas-knowledge/templates/heuristic-to-pattern_template.md, promotion_decision.md, and docs/architecture/cas-pattern-evolution-flow.md.

Promotion Criteria

Satisfies significance, reusability, recurrence, evidence_quality, governance_maturity, and strategic_alignment.

Governance Risks

Process overhead potentially slowing down the codification of straightforward best practices.

Traceability

Pattern Proposal

heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle

Scope Classification

Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Classification: global

Promotion Recommendation

recommendation-heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle

Promotion Decision

promotion-decision-heuristic-to-pattern-promotion-lifecycle

Next Step

  • Submit ADR to Architecture Forum for formal institutionalisation
  • Generate global pattern record in knowledge/global/patterns/