SDLC Agent-Skill Wiki

stage-review

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Stage: Review

Canonical lifecycle stage: judge that the built software is good before it ships — a quality gate over the code and its design, distinct from confirming it works (stage-validate). Review asks is it good? — is it correct under scrutiny, secure, performant, simple, well-architected, on-brand — and produces assessments and fixes (review reports, security/perf audits, simplifications), not a pass/fail on runtime behaviour. It runs after the build and typically gates entry to stage-release.

Derived projection — evidence is the capabilities that implements: [[stage-review]].

New stage (split out of stage-validate on 2026-07-05). Long the strongest parked split candidate on stage-validate: validate = confirm the software works (functional: UAT, runtime/browser tests, spec-conformance); review = confirm it is good (quality gate). Addy Osmani was the first framework to treat these as two distinct phases (a Verify phase ∥ a Review phase). gstack cleared the ≥2-framework bar: its sprint runs a distinct Review phase (code gstack-review + cross-model gstack-codex + design/DX/security) held separate from a distinct Test phase (functional QA gstack-qa). Two frameworks with the clean Verify∥Review partition → promoted, exactly as stage-specify was split from stage-plan and stage-learn from stage-release. See Why a distinct stage. Superpowers (2026-07-17) is now a third framework with the partition — functional sp-verification-before-completion ∥ quality sp-requesting-code-review — further confirming the split.

Why a distinct stage, not a flavor of validate

stage-validate executes the software and observes: does the feature work, do the tests pass, does the build match the spec? Review never runs the feature to check behaviour — it reads the artifact and judges its quality: a reviewer finding a race condition that passes CI, a security auditor modelling an exploit, a performance engineer flagging a regression, a simplifier removing complexity, an architect checking module boundaries. The two are adjacent (both gate release) but categorically different: validate is empirical (run it, observe), review is evaluative (read it, judge). Three frameworks (GSD, OpenSpec, Spec Kit) ship a functional validator but no quality-review capability at all — the cleanest evidence that the two activities are separable.

Matt Pocock — Skills for Real Engineers:

Addy Osmani — Agent Skills (its Review phase — skills + the /ship persona fan-out):

BMAD:

Compound Engineering (loop steps 4–5, plus review sub-agents):

gstack (its Review sprint phase — distinct from its Test phase):

Superpowers (review as a dispatched fresh-context gate + the reception discipline):

Cross-framework equivalents

The quality-review clusters span the six frameworks that ship a review capability:

Note GSD, OpenSpec, and Spec Kit ship no review capability — they validate functionally (gsd-verify-work, openspec-verify, speckit-converge) but do not treat quality review as a step. Their absence here is what makes review and stage-validate cleanly separable.

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