Task: Health review 1 — sprint 24 mid-sprint analysis
Table of Contents
This page documents a task in the Sprint health review — System 2 analysis story. It captures the goal, current status, acceptance, and any notes or results.
Goal
Produce a critical System 2 assessment of sprint 24's health at day 9 (2 days past its planned 7-day close, still marked STARTED with no retrospective): goal alignment, sprint load, PR velocity, story/task balance, and focus signal.
Status
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| State | DONE |
| Parent story | Sprint health review — System 2 analysis |
| Now | Complete. |
| Waiting on | Nothing. |
| Next | Nothing. |
| Last touched | 2026-07-30 |
Acceptance
- Full analysis written under
* Result; summary row added to sprint.org's* Health Reviewtable.
Plan
- Pre-register concerns before gathering evidence (schedule drift, backlog-dump shape of the story list, hotfix count, need for fleet-wide data rather than single-worktree data).
- Gather data: full read of
sprint.org; commit count and PR-merge count since sprint start; fleet-widecompass fleet -f jsonfor simultaneous STARTED stories across all 9 active worktrees; afind+grepsweep of everystory.orgunder the sprint directory for State and task count. - Analyse each of the five dimensions against the skill's explicit RAG thresholds.
- Write the full analysis here and append a summary row to
sprint.org's* Health Reviewtable.
Notes
Test Scenarios
Manual QA scenarios (scaffolded via compass add test_scenario, run
through the QA Validation Runner panel) that verify this task. Link
new ones here as they're created; the scenario doc itself links back
via its "Verifies task" field.
| Scenario | State | Notes |
|---|---|---|
PRs
| PR | Title |
|---|---|
| #1770 | [agile] Sprint 24 health review 1: RED (goal drift, focus signal) |
Review
| Comment summary | File | Decision | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Result
Review on 2026-07-30 (day 9 of 7)
Pre-registered concerns (written before gathering evidence): sprint's
planned close was 2026-07-28, and it is now 2 days over with no
retrospective and State: STARTED unchanged; the story list is huge
(57 stories) with seven identical, untouched "Commission ores.qt.X
into codegen" placeholders; five hotfixes landed this sprint, a real
quality signal; and this is a 9-worktree fleet, so focus cannot be
judged from one worktree alone.
Goal alignment
Mission: "Continue commissioning work across components, and improve IR generation." Matching every story against these two goals:
| Goal | Coverage | Representative stories (State, tasks) | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commissioning | Weak — literal goal untouched | 7× "Commission ores.qt.X into codegen" — all BACKLOG, 0 tasks each; codegen_dx_improvements (STARTED, 4/19 DONE) touches commissioning only indirectly via model-drift fixes |
RED |
| IR generation | Partial | ir-rates-followups (STARTED, 9/18 DONE) is direct; ir-curve-bootstrapping-and-republish (BACKLOG, 1 task) and rate-display-conventions (BACKLOG) not yet picked up |
AMBER |
| Neither goal | 7 of 11 STARTED stories | badge_colour_scheme_snags, calendar-followups, nats-configurable-wire-format, offload-services-to-wsl-host, split-services-into-per-service-containers, migrate-to-oresmd-delete-legacy-schemes, compass-quality-of-life-improvements — all legitimate engineering work, none of it commissioning or IR generation |
— |
The two literal "commission into codegen" goal stories have zero started work — seven identical placeholder rows sitting in BACKLOG all sprint. Meanwhile the majority of active (STARTED) effort — 7 of 11 concurrently open stories — serves neither stated goal. This is not "wishful mapping," it's an absence of mapping: the sprint's actual center of gravity is elsewhere (infra/tooling: WSL offload, NATS wire format, per-service containers, oresmd migration, compass QoL). Verdict: RED. Either the mission statement is stale, or the sprint has drifted away from it without anyone re-declaring the goal.
Sprint load
| Metric | Value | Target | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commits since 2026-07-21 | 830 | ≤ 1000 | under cap |
| Elapsed days | 9 | ≤ 7 | 2 days over |
| Commits/day average | 92.2 | — | — |
| Projected total if 2 more days needed to actually close | ~1015 | ≤ 1000 | would breach |
Commit volume itself is under the hard cap, but the day budget is already blown by 2 days and the sprint is still open — the "≤ 7 days" half of the target has already failed, independent of commit count. At the current 92/day rate, 2 more days to close pushes the projected total past 1000. Verdict: AMBER — soft-target breach on schedule, count trending toward (not yet over) the cap.
PR velocity
| Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PRs merged since 2026-07-21 | 105 | within 100–120 target band |
| Merge rate | 11.7/day (105 / 9d) | well above the ≥1/day floor |
| Open PRs (fleet) | 1 | #1763, opened today, not stalled |
| Long-open WIP (>1 day, no activity) | none | — |
By the letter of the metric this is healthy: rate is strong, total sits inside the target band, nothing is stuck. The caveat is that 100–120 was calibrated for a 7-day sprint and we are on day 9 — the same throughput has simply been sustained two days longer than planned, meaning the sprint's effective workload has grown mid-flight rather than converging. Verdict: GREEN on the metric itself, with the schedule dependency flagged.
Story and task balance
| Story | State | Tasks (DONE/BACKLOG/other) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
acme_corporation_holding_group |
STARTED | 7 DONE / 11 BACKLOG / 1 STARTED / 1 BLOCKED / 2 ABANDONED | genuinely mid-flight, not a split candidate |
ir-rates-followups |
STARTED | 9 DONE / 7 BACKLOG / 2 ABANDONED | half done, real work remains |
codegen_dx_improvements |
STARTED | 4 DONE / 14 BACKLOG / 1 BLOCKED | early stage despite 19 tasks |
calendar-followups |
STARTED | 10 DONE / 4 BACKLOG / 1 STARTED | mostly done — split candidate |
| All 57 stories (repo-wide) | — | 21 DONE / 11 STARTED / 25 BACKLOG | DONE ratio 21/57 = 0.37 |
No STARTED story is fully undecomposed (all have tasks), which is
good. But calendar-followups matches the skill's "sprawling story"
shape: 10 of 15 tasks DONE, only 4 BACKLOG + 1 STARTED remain — worth
checking its own * Acceptance against those 4 remaining tasks and,
if they're forward-looking extras rather than the core deliverable,
closing it DONE and splitting the remainder into a new focused story
per the skill's guidance, rather than carrying the whole thing into
sprint 25. The repo-wide DONE ratio of 0.37 falls in the 0.3–0.5
band. Verdict: AMBER.
Focus signal
| Metric | Value | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Simultaneously STARTED stories (repo-wide) | 11 | — |
| Simultaneously STARTED stories (fleet, distinct active worktrees) | 8 | — |
| Theme coherence | wildly divergent | — |
Fleet-wide (compass fleet -f json) shows 8 of 9 active worktrees
each on a different STARTED story: FX Spot Monitor UI, QuantLib
calendar materialisation, badge colour polish, marketdata model
drift, oresmd migration, NATS wire-codec consolidation, WSL host
offload, and Acme commissioning — plus codegen_dx_improvements and
compass-quality-of-life-improvements STARTED without a currently
active worktree. These are not variations on one theme; they span
UI, market data plumbing, build infra, messaging, and deployment.
Verdict: RED (6+ concurrent STARTED stories, no coherent theme).
This is exactly the "each 'just one more' story compounds
context-switching cost" pattern the skill warns about, now at 8–11
concurrent threads across the fleet.
Velocity
| Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Stories closed this sprint | 21 | includes 5 hotfixes closed same-day |
| Hotfixes landed | 5 | cmake-44-remaining-uninitialized-warnings, cmake-4-4-uninitialized-variable-warnings, fix-badge-tenant-read-scope-regression, fix-cmake-thread-libs-init-windows-warning, windows_ci_pip_self_upgrade_fix |
| Commits/day, PRs/day | 92.2 / 11.7 | both strong |
Raw throughput is genuinely high, and the team is clearly capable of absorbing production issues quickly (5 hotfixes, all closed). But volume and speed are not the same as health: high throughput spread across 8+ unrelated STARTED stories is compatible with both "the team is thriving" and "everyone is context-switching constantly and nothing important is finishing" — the DONE ratio (0.37) and the untouched literal-goal stories (7 "Commission ores.qt.X" stories, all BACKLOG) suggest the latter is at least partly true.
Overall verdict
| Dimension | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Goal alignment | RED |
| Sprint load | AMBER |
| PR velocity | GREEN |
| Story and task balance | AMBER |
| Focus signal | RED |
Overall: RED (two dimensions RED — goal alignment and focus signal
— is sufficient on its own, and RED on any single critical dimension
makes the sprint RED regardless of the other three). The single most
important concern is that the sprint's actual center of gravity has
drifted away from its stated mission: 7 of 11 concurrently STARTED
stories serve neither "commissioning" nor "IR generation," while the
7 stories that are literally that goal ("Commission ores.qt.X into
codegen") sit completely untouched in BACKLOG. The one fix that would
most improve sprint health is not more throughput — throughput is
already strong (PR velocity GREEN, 92 commits/day) — it is reducing
concurrent STARTED-story count from 8–11 down toward the 1–3 target,
closing out near-done stories like calendar-followups rather than
carrying them, and either re-committing to the "commission ores.qt.X"
goal stories or formally re-scoping the sprint mission to match what
is actually being worked on.