jpicklyk / review-quality

Review Quality Framework

This skill defines what a reviewer must verify before implementation work advances to
completion. It applies whether the reviewer is the orchestrator directly or a delegated
subagent.

The review gate exists because implementation agents optimize for getting things working,
not for verifying they built the right thing. Without a structured review checkpoint,
planned work gets silently dropped, tests get written to pass rather than to verify, and
unnecessary complexity accumulates. The review is where these failure modes get caught.

Critical separation of concerns: The reviewer must not be the same agent that wrote
the code or the tests. An agent reviewing its own work will rationalize rather than
evaluate. The reviewer reads, runs, and reports — it never fixes. If issues are found,
they go back to the implementation agent for resolution.

This is the same principle the needs-test-author trait applies one step earlier, to
test authorship itself — the test author must not be the implementer, for the same
rationalize-not-evaluate reason. Verifying that separation actually held (see
"Independence verification" in Area 3) is this rule applied to test authorship, not an
optional extra.

Getting Started

The reviewer is given an MCP item ID. Use MCP tools and codebase access to gather what
you need — do not expect context to be pre-loaded for you.

1. Load the item's notes — query_notes(itemId=..., includeBody=true) to retrieve
   the planning note and implementation-notes. The planning note's key depends on the
   item's schema: feature-summary (feature-implementation), task-scope (feature-task),
   or diagnosis (bug-fix).

2. Read the changed files — use the implementation notes to identify which files were
   modified, then read them directly. Review the actual code, not just summaries.

3. Run the test suite — execute the project's test command and capture the results.
   Do not assume tests pass because the implementation agent said they did.

4. For items carrying the needs-test-author trait — load the trait's test-plan
   and test-manifest notes via `query_notes(operation="list", itemId=...,
   includeBody=true)`, which carries the test author's own commit SHA range field, and
   obtain the orchestrator-provided per-child SHA table (Pre-SHA/Post-SHA/Test-Pre-SHA/
   Test-Post-SHA) plus any declared orchestrator fixture-repair commit SHAs from the review
   handoff, for cross-checking. A trait-bearing item with no test-plan note is a
   blocking issue on its own — do not proceed to the Area 3 independence verification
   until the note exists.

If the planning note (feature-summary / task-scope / diagnosis) or implementation notes
are missing, the review cannot proceed. Report this as a blocking issue.

Before reporting any file or artifact as missing, or any behavior as broken, verify with
a direct check — Read the exact expected path, an exact-path Glob, or a reproduction —
rather than inferring absence from one plausible directory or from a prior bug's pattern.
Two review false-positives reached verdicts this way before being caught downstream.

Review Areas

These four areas form the minimum review. Each one catches a different class of failure.
If the review surfaces additional concerns, include them — this is a floor, not a ceiling.

1. Test Suite Verification

Run the test suite before anything else. Everything downstream depends on knowing the
actual state of the tests.

Run ./gradlew :current:test and capture the output. Record the total test count and
the pass/fail breakdown.

If tests fail: Document every failure — test name, assertion message, and the file
where the test lives. Do not attempt to fix failures. Do not speculate about whether
failures are pre-existing or new. Report what you observe. Test failures are a blocking
issue — the item cannot advance with a failing test suite.

If tests pass: Record the count and move on.

2. Plan Alignment

Compare what was built against the planning note (feature-summary / task-scope /
diagnosis). The goal is to catch drift in both directions — work that was planned but
not done, and work that was done but not planned.

Check each acceptance criterion. Walk through the acceptance criteria from the
planning note one by one. For each criterion, identify the specific code change that
satisfies it. If a criterion has no corresponding implementation, flag it — either the
work is incomplete or the criterion was intentionally descoped (which should appear in
the implementation notes).

Check for unplanned changes. Review the changed files for modifications that don't
trace back to any acceptance criterion. Unplanned changes aren't automatically wrong —
sometimes implementation reveals necessary adjacent work. But they should be
acknowledged and justified in the implementation notes, not silent.

Check non-goals weren't violated. Review the planning note's non-goals list. If the
implementation touched areas that were explicitly scoped out, flag it.

Check semantic-claim citations. Every sentence in the planning note, the changed docs,
the CHANGELOG bullet and any new header or KDoc comment that states nullability, redaction,
ownership or an honest limit should cite a file:line. Open each cited line and confirm it
establishes the claim as worded (watch for inverted conditions such as ADMIN-AND vs ADMIN-OR).
An uncited claim of this kind is an observation. A claim the cited code contradicts is
blocking. For a NEW-SURFACE claim that cites a spec decision, confirm it against the diff.
Prose that is not a semantic claim needs no citation.

3. Test Quality

The planning note's test strategy defined what should be tested — happy paths, failure
paths, and edge cases. The reviewer verifies that the tests actually deliver on that
strategy, not just that they exist and pass.

This is where the separation of concerns matters most. The agent that wrote the tests
has an inherent bias toward believing they're correct. An independent reviewer can
evaluate whether the tests verify real behavior or just confirm that code runs.

Map tests to the test strategy. For each scenario in the planning note's test
strategy, identify the corresponding test. Missing coverage is a gap to report.

Evaluate test substance. Watch for these patterns that produce green results
without catching real bugs:

• Tautological assertions — asserting something equals itself, or that a non-null
  value is not null, without verifying the actual value is correct.

• Mock-heavy tests that verify nothing real — every dependency mocked, test only
  confirms mocks were called in order. Mocks are fine for isolation, but the test must
  still assert something meaningful about the unit's output or state change.

• Happy-path-only coverage — if the test strategy called for failure paths, those
  tests need to exist and need to verify the failure behavior is correct (right
  exception type, right error message, right fallback behavior).

• Overly broad assertions — result != null or list.isNotEmpty() when specific
  values, sizes, or contents should be checked. These pass even when the implementation
  is wrong.

• Assumption escapes — assumeTrue (or an equivalent guard) gating out a real
  failure instead of asserting against it, so the test silently skips rather than
  reporting the bug it was written to catch.

• Implementation-derived oracles — an expected value computed from the
  implementation's own formula or output rather than from an independent oracle source.
  These pass by construction and verify nothing.

Check edge cases. Verify each boundary condition from the test strategy has a
corresponding test. If implementation notes documented new edge cases discovered during
development, check whether tests were added for those too.

Independence verification (items with the needs-test-author trait). When the item
carries this trait, verify the test-author/implementer separation actually held before
trusting anything else found in this area — a compromised separation undermines every
other finding above it:

• Separation held. Confirm the test files were introduced within the test author's
  commit range, not the implementer's — check git log over both ranges using the
  test-manifest's commit SHA range field together with the orchestrator's per-child SHA
  table. Record the result as independent when actor and commit-range separation both
  hold, independent-degraded (temporal-only) when only ordering separates them (for
  example a Direct-tier bug-fix run in single-actor mode), or not-independent when
  separation did not hold. Any silent implementer edit to a test file after the author's
  range is a blocking issue, regardless of whether the edit looks benign — except
  orchestrator fixture-repair commits that were declared in the review handoff (listed
  with their SHAs). Those are not silent edits; verify they touched only construction/
  setup code, never assertions, before excluding them from the blocking rule.

• Manifest maps to spec scenarios. Cross-check the test-manifest's S-id-to-test
  mapping against the test-plan's numbered scenarios (S1…): every scenario must be
  marked covered or explicitly not-covered with a reason. Do not take "covered" on
  faith — open at least two of the claimed tests and read their bodies to verify the
  claimed coverage is real.

• Oracle spot-check. Pick one non-trivial scenario and trace its expected value back
  to the oracle source recorded in the test-plan (spec clause, stated algorithm, or
  external reference). If the expected value matches what the implementation produces
  but not what the named oracle source specifies, that is a blocking issue — it means
  the oracle was derived from the implementation rather than the spec.

• Arbitration record. Every ambiguity the test author flagged must have a named
  resolver in the manifest's arbitration record. Give oracle-degraded scenarios — ones
  where the oracle source itself was uncertain — a second, closer look.

• Forbidden-pattern declaration is true. Fetch the served rules
  forbidden-test-patterns and test-assertion-vacuity
  (query_rules(operation="get", rootId, key); fall back to the test-author skill's §7
  if either is unserved) and read the test bodies behind the test-manifest's
  forbidden-pattern declaration — do not take "none used" on faith. Every instance of a
  listed pattern (skip-guards on behavioral conditions, disjunctive escapes, not-null-only
  or assert.ok-only assertions, assertions that cannot fail given their fixture or
  harness) must appear in the declaration with a justification. An undeclared instance,
  or a declaration claiming none when instances exist, is a blocking issue regardless of
  whether the suite is green — a false declaration carries the same weight as
  not-independent, because the manifest is the audit trail everything above relies on.

4. Simplification

The reviewer does not run /simplify — that pass belongs at the feature level, not
per-task review. Check the implementation notes for whether /simplify was run during
implementation.

If /simplify made changes, verify those changes have test coverage. This is the
one thing the reviewer checks here — not the simplification itself, just whether the
resulting code is tested. Report coverage gaps; do not re-run simplify or evaluate its
judgment calls.

If /simplify was not run or made no changes, there is nothing to check in this
area — move on.

Coverage gaps found here are not blocking unless they leave a structural change
entirely unverified.

Review Output

The review produces a review-checklist note on the MCP item. Structure the note
around findings, not process.

Verdict

Every review must end with a clear verdict:

• Pass — all acceptance criteria met, tests pass and have substance, no blocking
  issues. The item can advance. An independence-verification result of
  independent-degraded (temporal-only) maps to Pass — record it in the audit note
  as the observed mode, not as a finding; it is the sanctioned outcome for Direct-tier
  single-actor runs, not a degradation to flag.

• Fail — blocking issues — test failures, missing acceptance criteria, critical
  gaps in test coverage, a nullability/redaction/ownership/honest-limit claim that its
  cited line contradicts, or (for items with the needs-test-author trait) a
  not-independent independence-verification result, an unexplained implementer edit
  to test files, or an undeclared or falsely declared forbidden test pattern. These fail
  the item even when the test suite is green — a compromised separation or a false
  manifest makes a passing suite untrustworthy. The item must go back for fixes before
  it can advance. List every blocking issue.

• Pass with observations — no blocking issues, but simplification findings or
  minor test quality concerns worth addressing. The item can advance, but the
  observations should be tracked for follow-up.

Findings Format

Report every finding you observe, at every severity. Do not withhold minor findings
and do not apply a high-severity-only bar — current models follow severity filters
literally, which suppresses real findings. Mark each finding blocking or observation
and state your confidence; the orchestrator's verdict handling (see Verdict, above)
is the downstream filter, not your own judgment about what is worth mentioning.

For each finding, state:

• What was expected (from the planning note or test strategy)
• What was found (in the code or test output)
• Severity (blocking or observation)
• Confidence (how sure you are this is a real issue, not a false positive)

Be specific. "Tests could be better" is not actionable. "Test testCreateItem asserts
only that the result is not null — it should verify the item's title and status match
the input parameters" is actionable.

Gate Enforcement

The reviewer does not advance the item. It fills the review-checklist note and
reports the verdict. The orchestrator reads the verdict and decides whether to:

• Advance the item (pass or pass-with-observations)
• Send the item back to the implementation agent with the blocking issues list (fail)

A failing verdict with clear findings gives the implementation agent exactly what to
fix without ambiguity.