SDLC Agent-Skill Wiki

stage-validate

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Stage: Validate

Canonical lifecycle stage: confirm the built software works — that it satisfies its requirements when actually run: user-acceptance testing, runtime/browser testing, goal-backward verification, and spec-conformance checking, diagnosing and fixing functional gaps. Framework- neutral name (was stage-verify, GSD’s term). This is the empirical half of “confirm the build is sound” — run it and observe. The evaluative half — judging whether the code is good (correctness review, security, performance, simplicity) — is now the sibling stage stage-review.

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

Narrowed on 2026-07-05: the quality-review half was split out to stage-review. This was long the widest stage, bundling does it work (functional) with is it good (quality). Addy Osmani treated them as two distinct phases (Verify ∥ Review); gstack became the second framework with that clean partition (a Test phase ∥ a Review phase), clearing the ≥2-framework bar. Validate now holds only the functional side; see stage-review for the quality gate. GSD, OpenSpec, and Spec Kit ship only a functional validator (no review), which is the evidence that made the split clean.

GSD — Verify (does it work):

Addy Osmani — Agent Skills — Verify (does it work):

OpenSpec — Verify (does it match the spec):

  • openspec-verify — check implementation vs artifacts for completeness, correctness, coherence (advisory, non-blocking).

Spec Kit — Verify (does it match the spec, then re-plan the gap):

Compound Engineering — functional testing:

gstack — its Test sprint phase (does it work) + enabling browser infrastructure:

Superpowers — evidence-gate validation (do the claims hold):

  • sp-verification-before-completion — the Iron Law “no completion claims without fresh verification evidence”: run the command, read the full output, then claim (pattern-evidence-before-claims). A distinctive validator — it verifies the agent’s own success claims against reproducible command output rather than checking the build against a spec/goal (the empirical honesty half of “confirm the build is sound”).

(Note: gstack-benchmark is a performance audit, so it lives in stage-review with the other performance capabilities, not here — even though gstack colloquially groups it under “Test”.)

Cross-framework equivalents

The frameworks check different functional things — complementary lenses. GSD’s gsd-verify-work checks functional correctness via UAT; OpenSpec’s openspec-verify and Spec Kit’s speckit-converge add spec-conformance (does the build satisfy the change’s requirements/design); Addy’s addy-browser-testing and CE’s ce-test-browser / ce-dogfood plus gstack’s gstack-qa add runtime browser testing with real data; CE’s ce-test-xcode and gstack’s gstack-ios-qa cover native iOS. GSD’s gsd-verifier, OpenSpec’s openspec-verify, and Spec Kit’s speckit-converge are the nearest analogues (all spec/goal-backward); Spec Kit’s is distinctive in being action-oriented — it re-plans the gap into new tasks rather than only reporting it (“bidirectional feedback”). Superpowers’ sp-verification-before-completion adds a different lens entirely — not “does the build match the spec” but “did the agent actually run the check it’s claiming passed” — a cross-cutting evidence gate applied at every “done”, with no counterpart in the other frameworks (not set equivalent_to). Its presence also makes Superpowers the third framework (after Addy and gstack) to cleanly separate functional validate from quality review — reinforcing the 2026-07-05 split below.

Resolved 2026-07-05 (the former stage-review split candidate). The quality-gate activities that used to be parked here — code review, security, performance, simplification, architecture & design/DX audit — were promoted into stage-review once gstack became the second framework (after Addy) to treat Verify and Review as distinct lifecycle phases. See stage-review for that stage and its clusters.

See Also

  • stage-review — the sibling split out of this stage (2026-07-05): validate confirms the software works, review confirms it is good.
  • stage-implement — produces what is validated.
  • stage-release — runs once validation (and review) pass.

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