The SliceOps framework

Twelve canonical principles, one atomic unit of work, and an audit plane enforced in CI. Here is how it fits together.

The canonical model

Work is organized into three structural levels, plus one view computed from the dependency graph.

Block

A logical grouping of slices with coherent scope. It closes with a retrospective and calibrates velocity afterward — not a sprint, epic, or milestone.

Section

A functional domain inside a block — the SEC segment of a slice's identifier. Stable across blocks: domain is structural, not temporal.

Slice

The atomic, vertical, end-to-end unit of work: one agent chat, one PR, one cohesive outcome. Not a story, ticket, or task.

Stage

A computed view of the dependency graph — which slices are mergeable now. Derived, never committed to in a ceremony. Not a sprint or phase.

BL-XX.SEC-XX.SL-XXX

Every slice carries this identifier through its branch, commits, PR title, and decision records — the provenance thread that ties the whole system together.

Anatomy of a slice

A slice is the smallest unit that is independent, testable, and useful — and it carries its whole outcome with it.

Independent

Mergeable without breaking what exists. One architectural concern only — if it spans more, split it.

Testable

Validated by at least one test before it can merge.

Useful

Adds incremental value, not refactoring for its own sake.

Scope · decision · code · tests · evidence · merge — one chat, one PR.

Sized in tokens, not story points

Slices are sized by expected token consumption — deterministic and cross-model, unlike team-relative estimates. Recommended defaults:

XS
< 2M tokens
S
2–5M tokens
M
5–10M tokens
L
10–20M tokens
XL
> 20M — a red flag to split

Evidence by construction

Every slice produces evidence in four mandatory categories, plus a security gate. Un-evidenced slices do not merge.

Functional

Tests pass.

Quality

Linters and metrics — coverage, format, complexity.

Decision

Decision Records and insight records.

Provenance

Slice ID, agent, timestamps, commit SHA.

Security is its own per-slice gate: secrets scan, SAST, dependency and supply-chain checks — not a periodic audit.

The audit plane: Decision Records

No code-quality tool, runtime monitor, or compliance platform audits the decision plane — what was decided, by whom, why, and with what supersession chain. That layer is the SliceOps wedge.

  • 01Every architectural decision is a Decision Record with frontmatter that maps to a cognitive entity model agents can reason over.
  • 02Records are append-only — never deleted, never silently rewritten. Supersession is a bidirectional, acyclic edge: the new record declares what it replaces, the old one points forward.
  • 03Each record traces back to the slice that produced it and stays reachable from it.
  • 04CI rejects any PR that breaks the schema, orphans a decision, or leaves a supersession chain inconsistent.
Lifecycleproposed → accepted → superseded / deprecated

Stage as a DAG-derived view

Slices declare their dependencies with explicit edges. A Stage is computed by traversing that graph — Stage N is whatever is unblocked at step N. Parallelism falls out of the topology, not out of a planning meeting. Forecasting and retrospectives happen at the block level; there are no burndown charts and no “we committed to N slices this sprint.”

Fourteen merge gates

The canonical R-rules (R1–R14) are hard CI gates — each one traces back to a principle. Adopters add their own from R15 onward.

R1No secrets in markdown or YAML.
R2No broken cross-references.
R3Frontmatter required and valid.
R4Decision-registry consistency — every cited decision has a record.
R5Lifecycle transitions are atomic — move, status, and both supersession edges in one PR.
R6No TODO/FIXME/HACK in frozen decisions or specs.
R7External-source provenance preserved.
R8SemVer discipline — plan and spec versions move in lockstep.
R9Cross-repo agent context stays in sync.
R10Archived files are immutable.
R11Confidentiality classification present and in range.
R12Imports restricted to an authorized source tree.
R13The slice ledger is updated on every closing PR.
R14No content outside the repo's declared scope.

Three wedges

Audit plane

The architectural-decision layer no existing tool audits.

Multi-agent parallelism

DAG-driven — five to thirteen simultaneous agents as a normal operating mode.

AI-readable engineering

Every artifact is structured so the next agent can learn from it.

The 12 canonical principles

Remove any one and the result is no longer SliceOps. They hold across any runtime, any language, any team size.