Story: Sprint health review — System 2 analysis

Table of Contents

This page documents a story in Sprint 18. It captures the goal, current status, acceptance criteria, and the tasks that compose it.

Goal

A sprint-reviewer skill that an LLM can invoke mid-sprint or at close to produce a structured System 2 health report and write it into sprint.org under a new * Health Review section. The review is deliberately slow and critical — it questions whether stories serve the sprint goals, whether the sprint is overloaded, and whether the team is focused — rather than merely summarising status.

Status

Field Value
State DONE
Parent sprint Sprint 18
Now Complete.
Waiting on Nothing.
Next None.
Last touched 2026-05-28

Acceptance

  • Invoking sprint-reviewer produces a * Health Review section written into the current sprint.org.
  • Section contains all of the following sub-sections:
    • Goal alignment — for each sprint goal, which stories serve it; goals with no story coverage flagged; stories with no clear goal flagged as potential scope creep.
    • Sprint load — commit count since sprint start, elapsed days, commits/day average, projected total at close; verdict against the ≤ 300 commit / ≤ 7 day targets.
    • PR velocity — PRs merged per day, open PRs, any PRs open longer than one day (WIP accumulation signal).
    • Story and task balance — stories without tasks (not decomposed), stories that have been STARTED the longest without closing, ratio of DONE to BACKLOG+STARTED.
    • Focus signal — number of simultaneously STARTED stories; stories touching unrelated themes (cross-cutting concern flag).
    • Overall verdict — red/amber/green per dimension, one-paragraph narrative summary.
  • The section is idempotent: re-running replaces the existing * Health Review block rather than appending a second one.
  • The sprint template (sprint.org generated by compass add sprint) includes an empty * Health Review placeholder so the section is expected from day one.

Tasks

Task State Start End Description
Task: Implement sprint-reviewer skill DONE 2026-05-25 2026-05-25 Write the sprint-reviewer SKILL.org: reads sprint.org + git log + gh API, computes health metrics, and writes a System 2 review section into sprint.org.
Task: Health review 1 — sprint 18 mid-sprint analysis DONE 2026-05-25 2026-05-25 First System 2 health review of sprint 18: goal alignment, load, PR velocity, story/task balance, focus signal, velocity, and overall verdict.
Task: Move health review content from sprint.org into task DONE 2026-05-25 2026-05-25 The Health Review section in sprint.org is too verbose; full review content belongs in the task Result section with only a short link left in sprint.org.
Task: Health review 2 — sprint 18 backlog audit and shape check DONE 2026-05-26 2026-05-26 Audit all sprint 18 stories and tasks: close items with incorrect status, verify story/task shapes follow the document contract, and flag anything that needs cleanup.
Task: Health review 3 — sprint 18 close analysis DONE 2026-05-29 2026-05-29 Final System 2 health review at sprint close: goal achievement assessment, shape completeness fixes, sprint verdict.

Decisions

  • Named sprint-reviewer (not sprint-health or sprint-audit) to match the existing skill naming convention (noun-verb, kebab-case).
  • The review is written into sprint.org (not to stdout) so it is version-controlled, searchable, and available to future LLM sessions without re-running the analysis.
  • Targets are load: ≤ 300 commits, ≤ 7 days. These are soft thresholds — a sprint that is slightly over is amber, not automatically red.
  • The skill does not edit stories or tasks — it only reads and reports. Remediation is left to the human or to subsequent skill invocations.

Out of scope

  • Automated remediation (moving stories to backlog, splitting tasks).
  • Historical comparison across sprints (this is sprint-scoped only).
  • Blocking CI or PRs on health verdicts.

Emacs 29.1 (Org mode 9.6.6)