Skip to content

adr-registry-guarded-governance-state-machine

Decision

Promote registry-guarded-governance-state-machine to core institutionalised architecture pattern governing state machine lifecycle transitions across autonomous agents.

Context

  • Source: governance-flow
  • Pattern: registry-guarded-governance-state-machine
  • Promotion Recommendation: recommendation-registry-guarded-governance-state-machine
  • Scope Classification: global
  • Scope Classification Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Autonomous agents generating actions or modifying governance records can trigger unauthorized, corrupted, or out-of-order state transitions. Enforcing a strict TransitionRegistry finite-state machine validates all preconditions before state transitions are committed.

Scope

Applicability: All multi-agent runners, lifecycle state transitions, and architectural artifact promotions within the CAS governance ecosystem.

Global architectural guardrail constraining lifecycle transitions.

Consequences

Governance

Prevents illegal lifecycle bypasses and enforces strict gate checks across all autonomous agent actions.

Execution

Introduces deterministic precondition checks in the action execution path, rejecting unregistered transitions with GovernanceException.

System Behaviour

Guarantees traceable, auditable, and deterministic state evolution across governed entities.

Evidence Summary

Promotion Evidence

Verified in production usage, aligned with governance models, and supported by current architecture state in governance_action_engine.py.

Promotion Criteria

Satisfies significance, reusability, recurrence, evidence quality, governance maturity, and strategic alignment.

Governance Risks

Unregistered intermediate state deadlocks under unanticipated exception conditions.

Traceability

Pattern Proposal

registry-guarded-governance-state-machine

Scope Classification

Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Classification: global

Promotion Recommendation

recommendation-registry-guarded-governance-state-machine

Promotion Decision

promotion-decision-registry-guarded-governance-state-machine

Next Step

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