15 — Preparation task briefs and stakeholder questions

Updated 2026-10-30 following the project owner's request: tracker tasks must explain what happens next, not just name a topic.

The live briefs are in tracker/data/milestones.json, displayed at /tasks/{id}. They are planning records for the internal team, not confirmed product requirements or architectural decisions.

Required content for planned work

• A concrete goal and scope (summary, Markdown description).
• Checkable execution steps (steps) and expected outputs (deliverables).
• Inputs/dependencies by task ID (dependencies). These identify related work, not an automatic block on starting independent investigation.
• A proposed responsible role (suggested_owner) until an actual owner is assigned.
• Specific questions where information is missing (questions), each with a stable ID, the role who should answer (asked_of), why the answer matters (why) and an open/answered state.

When someone answers, record the answer, respondent, RFC 3339 timestamp and source. Update the relevant domain document/ADR when a decision is actually confirmed. Do not fill an unknown with an assumption and label it answered. Direct questions to people in chat or record the intended recipient; recording a role is not permission to send external messages.

Audit result

• 13 pending tasks gained scope, steps, outputs, dependencies and 39 questions: T-203; T-303–T-304; T-501–T-506; T-601–T-602; T-701–T-702.
• 5 completed title-only records gained evidence-based descriptions: T-102, T-103, T-105, T-106, T-301. Their completion/review history was retained; no retrospective tests or execution dates were invented.
• T-302 summary now reflects the confirmed SQL Server decision instead of the earlier PostgreSQL recommendation. The human review history remains unchanged.

Example: T-303 hosting decision

The deliverable is an informed hosting decision and ADR, supported by university constraints, an inventory, capacity/availability needs, ownership and acquisition constraints. It is not a decision already made by the agent.

The five question IDs are T303-Q1 … T303-Q5. Intended respondents are the project owner, university infrastructure/DBA/security contacts, registrar/admissions owners and budget/procurement owners. Ask for confirmed requirements and named contacts before choosing among government cloud, university infrastructure or a justified combination.

Hosting remains open. SQL Server is decided; its version/edition/license details and hosting location remain to be confirmed. Financial, grading, retention and other policy values remain university/lecturer configuration; model-design tasks ask who owns/approves these policies and how versions apply, rather than blocking on fixed numeric values.

The other pending tasks define draft design/research/planning outputs. The use-case approval gate still applies before implementing TNSU product behaviour; this brief-enrichment work does not itself approve use cases, an R1 baseline, an infrastructure provider, a data model or a new technology.