Quality standards and guardrails

Problem

As more contributors add chart types, modify the YAML schema, or change normalization behavior, there are no enforced quality standards governing how schema versions are bumped, how migrations are written, or how output consistency is verified. Without automated guardrails, contributors can introduce breaking changes to the YAML contract without corresponding migrations, leading to dashboards that silently fail to compile or render differently after an upgrade.

Context

• Teams are judging readiness for the YAML contract, compiler/normalizer, execution adapters, and release/versioning 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 dataface/core/, schema/compiled types, docs, and core test suites, 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 the YAML contract, compiler/normalizer, execution adapters, and release/versioning, 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