Quality standards and guardrails

Problem

As more contributors produce dashboard templates, output quality is diverging — naming conventions, chart configurations, query patterns, and layout structures vary by author with no enforcement mechanism. The quality rubric exists as guidance but nothing prevents a substandard template from being published. Without enforceable standards and guardrails in the production pipeline, the growing contributor base will produce increasingly inconsistent quickstarts and examples that erode user trust in the template catalog.

Context

• Teams are judging readiness for repeatable production, review, and publishing of quickstarts and example dashboards inconsistently because there is no single quality bar that covers correctness, UX clarity, failure handling, and maintenance expectations.
• Without explicit standards, work gets approved on local intuition and later re-opened when another reviewer finds a gap that was never written down.
• Expected touchpoints include examples/, review/publishing docs, production-line scripts, and dashboard content fixtures, review checklists, docs, and any eval or QA surfaces used to prove a change is safe to ship.

Possible Solutions

• A - Rely on experienced reviewers to enforce quality informally: flexible, but it does not scale and leaves decisions hard to reproduce.
• B - Recommended: define a concise quality rubric plus guardrails: specify acceptance criteria, required evidence, and clear anti-goals so reviews are consistent.
• C - Block all new work until a comprehensive handbook exists: safer in theory, but too heavy for the milestone and likely to stall momentum.

Plan

1. List the failure modes and review disagreements that matter most for repeatable production, review, and publishing of quickstarts and example dashboards, using recent work as concrete examples.
2. Turn those into a small set of quality standards, required validation evidence, and explicit guardrails for unsupported or risky cases.
3. Update the relevant docs, task/checklist expectations, and test or QA hooks so the standards are actually enforced.
4. Use the rubric on a representative set of recent or in-flight items and tighten the wording anywhere it still leaves too much ambiguity.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared