Task: Health review 1 — sprint 26 close analysis

The mission has three passes, run in order: sync codegen and clear drift, analyse the user journeys, then build the UX. All three have real work, and none is uncovered.

Verdict AMBER: each goal advanced, and each still holds an open remainder.

The tree carries about four times the commit ceiling. The load is uneven: two near-idle days (2026-09-24 and 09-25) sit before a burst of 1018 commits on 09-26. After the burst the rate never falls below 123 commits on an active day. This is the shape of an overrun sprint, not of a stall: work continued on every day to the review.

Verdict RED: the velocity is the load's twin. The sprint merged about five times the planned PR count, and no WIP piled up. A merged pull request never sat waiting.

The five undecomposed stories:

• Add proper curve support to ores.marketdata
• Record trade activities, their participants and trade links
• Model operational authorisation and the client-facing agreement
• Model trade structures
• Observe a run while it works

Verdict AMBER: the ratio is comfortably green, but five backlog stories carry no tasks at all, so no one can see their shape.

The fourteen in flight: clean-dq, clean-reporting, clean-scheduler, clean-synthetic, extract-user-journeys, exercise-workflow, full-report-pipeline, acme-report-grid-smoke-test, build_approvals_and_notifications, implement-operations-journeys, implement_refdata_journeys, standardise_the_record_screens, remove_the_legacy_qt_remnants and pattern_language_for_service_interaction.

Verdict RED: fourteen stories in flight across five themes. The split cut the count from eighteen, and each carried story now holds a small, honest remainder, but the sprint still closes with fourteen open fronts.

Verdict AMBER: throughput was high and converged to the last day — 123 commits and two fresh pull requests on the review day — but the sprint closes with a quarter of its stories and tasks open, after running to nearly twice its planned length.

The close policy: rework and split is the default. When a story has delivered a large part of its scope, reword the story and its acceptance to the work that shipped, close it DONE, and give the remainder a new, more focused story. Carry a story STARTED only when its remainder is small and a split does not make sense.

Each source story now states what it delivered, and its traceability paragraph names its successor. The other fourteen STARTED stories were carried, each with its small remainder.

• 62 DONE tasks brought to shape: #+branch: and #+pr: where missing, a * PRs row where missing, and 37 Waiting on and Next cells cleared to exactly Nothing.
• 5 hotfix story files repaired from a literal +#+ prefix.
• 9 sprint.org rows fixed to the table's shape.
• The compass task move row-scope defect found while splitting: it matched a task's link in a Status Next cell before the * Tasks row. Fixed in compass.py, with a regression test (test_task_move_row_scope.py, 1 passed). The one move it damaged (task 859762E0) was repaired in both stories, and the stale row it left in the access story was deleted.
• Task 49B3C660's invalid State IN PROGRESS repaired to STARTED.
• The merged-PR chart fetch fixed (--limit 1000) and the four charts regenerated.
• The duplicate scan over the sprint's stories found no duplicates.
• 366 local branches of merged pull requests deleted. Five branches stay because other worktrees hold them: feature/add-the-pattern-document-type-and-hub (bright_faraday), feature/close-the-marketdata-test-coverage (prime_origin), feature/generate-the-remaining-shell-surfaces (solid_dirac), feature/implement-access-journeys (swift_curie) and feature/rename-the-anchor-to-trade (merry_newton).

./compass.sh sprint audit at ac422ea148: 58 findings, saved in full beside this task in evidence/sprint_audit_2026-10-05.txt.

• 6 open tasks whose pull requests have all merged. The audit flags a task that stays open while every pull request it names is merged. Each was read: all six are genuinely open, and each names its remainder.
  1. Model the handcrafted ores.dq code and generate the artefact tables (686E9BB0, clean dq)
  2. Bring ores.scheduler to the clean standard (49B3C660)
  3. Bring ores.synthetic to the clean standard (8063C1A9)
  4. Default the shell facet on at the profile level (9B53C333, BLOCKED; now in the successor story)
  5. Add the identity workflow and the commands that drive it (0442FD13)
  6. Remove the presentation keys no template reads (54AEFA10)
• 52 closed documents whose Now is not exactly Nothing. The audit wants the bare word. Each holds its close prose: "All tasks done.", "Merged as <sha>.", or a summary of the result. That prose is the historical record, so this review records the drift and does not rewrite it.

The documents this review closed — the four reworked source stories, this task and its story — carry exactly Nothing. in Now, Waiting on and Next, so none of them appears in either list.

Sprint 26 does not have a stalling problem; it has a scale problem. It carried about four times the commit ceiling and about five times the PR band, and it ran to day thirteen of a planned seven. All three goals advanced, but fourteen stories are still in flight and five backlog stories carry no tasks. The widest fix, the rework-and-split, is now executed: four sprawling stories became honest DONE records with named successors. Lowering the STARTED count further, one story at a time, is the next lever. Sprint load and PR velocity are RED together, so the overall verdict is RED.

The review ran at the sprint's close, and the close itself landed on this same branch. What the close changed, read against the review above:

• The four rework-and-splits this review executed mid-analysis were joined by seven more: eleven stories closed DONE at the scope they delivered, each reworded so its Goal and Acceptance describe only what shipped, with its remainder in a successor story in the product backlog inbox.
• The nineteen other open stories were carried whole to the inbox by file move, identifiers intact. The sprint table marks each of their rows ABANDONED with the close date, and the fourteen STARTED stories it names are no longer open fronts: none of them starts sprint 27 in flight.
• The sprint table's 127 rows now read 107 DONE and 20 ABANDONED — the last DONE row is this review's own story, which the table did not carry — and the sprint carries its achievements, its retrospective and its release notes.
• The 51 closed documents this review recorded as carrying prose in Now were repaired: the prose moved to * Result and Now set to exactly Nothing.. compass sprint audit reports no findings.
• release_notes.org was generated from the 519 merged PRs and edited into the sprint's record; version.org records the sprint as closed.
• Four pull requests merged while the close branch was open: #2652, the approvals and notifications service; #2644, the currency, desk group and currency pair screens; #2655, the split of my profile from the People screens; and #2646, the holiday calendar screen, which completed the refdata journeys story and retired the successor it had been given. The close absorbed their seven closed tasks back into the sprint's stories and reworded those stories and their successors to record the completions.

The verdict stands: the sprint was RED on load and velocity, and the close does not change that. It records it honestly instead.