FAQ
Do I need to know the commands?
Section titled “Do I need to know the commands?”No. Say what you want in plain language - “plan the next sprint”, “extract the spec from this code”. The commands shown throughout the docs are the explicit form for people who prefer them.
What do PRD, epic, story and acceptance criteria mean?
Section titled “What do PRD, epic, story and acceptance criteria mean?”A PRD is the product requirements - what to build and why. Epics are the big chunks of that work; stories are the small, testable pieces. Acceptance criteria are the checkable conditions that say a story is done. SDLC Studio writes them all as plain files you can read and edit.
What is the two-backlog model?
Section titled “What is the two-backlog model?”A discovery backlog holds requests (change requests and RFCs) - ideas, not committed work. A delivery backlog holds sized epics, stories and bugs. A request becomes delivery work only when refine decomposes and sizes it. See the two-backlog model.
Refine or triage - what is the difference?
Section titled “Refine or triage - what is the difference?”refine turns an accepted CR or RFC into sized delivery work (epics + stories). triage turns an untriaged issue into bugs (or closes it). Both cross a request from discovery into delivery.
Issue or bug - which do I file?
Section titled “Issue or bug - which do I file?”A bug is delivery work: a defect with a severity and a size, fixed through its Done gate. An issue is a discovery-tier report you have not yet triaged into bugs.
How is “Done” decided?
Section titled “How is “Done” decided?”Two conditions. The story’s executable acceptance criteria must pass (verify_ac runs them), and one independent reviewer who is not the author must approve it, in at most two rounds. The operator then signs the run once with sprint.py sign, which moves each unit to Done. You cannot simply write Status: Done; conformance re-checks it. See executable acceptance criteria and one independent review.
Greenfield or brownfield - which path?
Section titled “Greenfield or brownfield - which path?”You do not have to choose. /sdlc-studio init guided classifies the repo for you at the first stage and forks itself: on an empty repo it interviews you for the specs, on existing code it reverse-engineers them. The rule that makes the second path safe is that a generated spec stays a hypothesis until its tests pass against the real implementation. See the greenfield and brownfield walkthroughs.
Where does it put files?
Section titled “Where does it put files?”Plain markdown under sdlc-studio/ in your project, so everything is reviewable and version-controlled - prd.md, epics/, stories/, bugs/, reviews/, and more. Generated test code goes under tests/.
Which agents does it work in?
Section titled “Which agents does it work in?”Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, opencode and Gemini CLI - one install covers them. It is a standard Agent Skill. See Works with your agent.
Is it an npm package or an SDK?
Section titled “Is it an npm package or an SDK?”No. It is a curl-installed Agent Skill - a folder of instructions, templates and scripts. There is nothing to import into your code, no account, and no server.
What is the sprint loop?
Section titled “What is the sprint loop?”sprint runs a prioritised batch toward a Sprint Goal: one sentence of twenty words or fewer, set with --sprint-goal and approved with the plan. Each unit is built against its acceptance criteria and reviewed by one reviewer who did not write it, in at most two rounds. sprint close then runs the close in one pass, and sprint sign seals the one-page report. --goal is a different setting: how far along the ladder (triage → plan → design → done) the run goes, and --goal done takes it all the way. See the sprint.
Why a sprint and not one ticket at a time?
Section titled “Why a sprint and not one ticket at a time?”Because most of what the discipline buys you is a property of a set. You cannot rank a batch of one, you cannot fan out across file-disjoint lanes, you cannot spot two units that contradict each other, and you have no boundary between delivery and close at which to review - so every finding arrives as close work. Measured on this project, the fixed cost of a run is spread over the batch: small batches are the expensive ones. See a spec per run, or a sprint?.
What is an audit?
Section titled “What is an audit?”A read-only sweep that hunts for real defects in a codebase, verifies each candidate through a panel that tries to refute it, and files the survivors as bugs or change requests with allocated ids. audit --profile repo runs on a repository that has never seen SDLC Studio, so it is the try-before-you-adopt path. See audit.
What is a sprint charter?
Section titled “What is a sprint charter?”A run that has not happened yet: its goal, the rule that selects its batch, and its appetite. Charters queue up, and sprint next materialises the head of the queue against the backlog as it stands at that moment - never against the backlog as it stood when the charter was written. See charters.
How do I upgrade an existing project?
Section titled “How do I upgrade an existing project?”Re-run the installer, or /sdlc-studio skill-update, then run migrate (a dry run) and migrate --apply in each project. v6 is not a drop-in: it removes the v5 ceremony, and migrate names each retired setting, verb and instruction line it finds. See upgrading.