Publish the environment contract for service owners
New owners know variable names but not which settings can change independently, which require restart, or how failure appears.
- Focused work estimate
- 2h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- Medium
- Engineering practice
- Documentation generation · Service ownership
Estimated field mix
- DevOps70%
- Developer tooling30%
Field percentages are editorial estimates of the ticket's engineering focus. They total 100%; they are not measured time, proficiency scores, or ownership evidence.
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Project context
A fictional notification service uses environment files assembled by shell scripts. Defaults differ by machine, secret values appear in diagnostics, and emergency flags have no expiry. Build a typed local configuration compiler with fake secret references and synthetic environments; no real credentials or notification providers are supplied.
Setup prerequisites
- Configuration precedence
- Schema validation
- Least privilege
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
- DENV-101 · Define precedence without depending on process order
- DENV-102 · Reject missing required values before service startup
- DENV-103 · Keep secret values out of configuration diffs
- DENV-105 · Require expiry and ownership for emergency feature overrides
- DENV-104 · Validate cross-field configuration invariants
- DENV-106 · Promote configuration by immutable revision
- DENV-108 · Detect environment drift without copying secret data
- DENV-107 · Resolve secret rotation without restarting into a mixed revision
- DENV-109 · Roll back configuration without rolling back application code
Acceptance criteria
- Reference lists type, source, default, sensitivity, reload behavior, and owner
- Cross-field invariants and rollback compatibility are linked
- Examples use synthetic values and secret references only
Implementation constraints
- Generated reference comes from the same schema used by validation.
Verification to include
- Generate and review documentation for every current field.
- Add an undocumented schema field and make the consistency test fail.
Deliverables
- Generated environment reference and owner runbook
Rollout and recovery
Require schema and documentation consistency in CI.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice configuration as a reviewed contract with safe diagnostics, provenance, and rollback.
For the team: Review environment changes before deployment and reduce outages caused by missing, stale, or silently defaulted settings.
Evidence boundaries
Outcome Evidence: Tests, patches, and runbooks are requested deliverables. They become Outcome Evidence only through a qualified Mission and immutable Evidence IDs.
Ownership Evidence: Independent adaptation must be observed under a declared verification policy and cite immutable Evidence IDs. Completing a planning ticket establishes no Ownership Evidence.