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SDLC Studio

Two-role review & sign-off

Review in SDLC Studio is independent of the author, by construction. This is a gate, not a guideline.

Two roles, never merged

Section titled “Two roles, never merged”
  • The adversarial reviewer - a fresh context that did not write the code. It runs an adversarial pass, tries to break the change, and files findings as evidence. It does not approve.
  • The reviewer of record - the operator, or a named delegate in a separate trust boundary. It ratifies the evidence and records the sign-off.

The author is neither. A self-review never clears the Done gate: the check compares the reviewer id against the author id, and a unit whose reviewer equals its author - or that has no recorded author - fails.

Why mechanical

Section titled “Why mechanical”

Volume is the problem. When an agent authors most of the change, “please have someone review it” collapses under load, and the tempting shortcut is to let the author bless their own work. Making the separation mechanical removes the shortcut: the tooling refuses to record a sign-off the author controls, so the human ratifies evidence someone else produced rather than re-reading every line.

The forward-only threshold

Section titled “The forward-only threshold”

A project sets review.two_role_after in its config. A delivery unit numbered past that threshold reaches Done only with an independent reviewer-of-record sign-off; earlier units keep the project’s prior behaviour. The discipline applies forward, so turning it on does not retroactively block delivered work.

How a close uses it

Section titled “How a close uses it”
/sdlc-studio sprint close --apply-signoff --principal "you"

--apply-signoff fans the reviewer-of-record’s approval into a per-unit sign-off for each story in the batch, transitions each to Done, and records the evidence. The adversarial pass is recorded separately (a sprint-level review can cover a batch as its evidence).

See also

Section titled “See also”