Quality standards and guardrails

Problem

As more contributors work on the GCP deployment pipeline, Fivetran integration points, and operational runbooks, there are no defined quality standards for these artifacts. Deployment configs, Terraform modules, runbook formatting, and integration test coverage vary by author. Without enforced standards and guardrails — linting for infrastructure-as-code, required test coverage for integration paths, runbook templates — quality will degrade as the contributor base expands beyond the original engineering team.

Context

• Teams are judging readiness for deployment, billing, connectivity, and production launch integration 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 deployment automation, environment/runbook docs, billing/integration code, and ops checks, 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 deployment, billing, connectivity, and production launch integration, 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