The Five-stage Lifecycle

Every package moves through the same five stages, and the tab rail across the top of a package is the lifecycle: inputs on the left, a governed running system on the right. This tour walks one package through all five, with links into the full documentation for each stage.

1 · Design Inputs

State what the solution must do and under which rules: requirements, structured fields (data classes, residency, resilience), applicable regulations, and grounding documents. Quality here is leverage everywhere else.

2 · Architecture

Run the automated design. The loop generates from your approved catalog, checks your controls, remediates what it can, and pauses only for genuinely human decisions: open gaps to decide, boundary growth to accept or discard. Edit and lock what you know better; the platform preserves your judgment across re-runs.

3 · Assurance

Judge the design: control-by-control compliance results, the multi-agent design review, the risk register, and governed exceptions for decisions that are honestly deferred.

4 · Review & Approval

The stage gate: a readiness board computed from actual state, human reviewers with recorded decisions, and an approval that locks the package immutably and captures the baseline.

5 · Operate

The approved design meets production: drift detection watches for divergence, the conformance gate enforces the baseline in CI/CD, and delivery planning turns the design into tracked work with progress syncing back.

Alongside all five, Diagrams renders the current design as C4 views at every step.

The Loop, Not the Line

The stages read left to right, but real work cycles: assurance findings feed re-runs, reviews request changes, approved packages get revised. The lifecycle's job is that every cycle passes through the same gates.