test-driver/research/findings/F-0001-milestone-sequence-drift.md

id	type	class	status	discovered	resolved	discovered_by	source	workplan	task
F-0001	framework-finding	CONCEPT_DRIFT	resolved	2026-08-22	2026-08-22	concept-assessment	history/2026-08-22-concept-assessment-swot.md	TD-WP-0002	TD-WP-0002-T01

F-0001 — Three conflicting milestone sequences

Class

CONCEPT_DRIFT — the repository carried three mutually inconsistent statements of the same concept, with no explicit decision revising any of them.

Note the unusual shape: §5 of the Improvement Loop defines concept drift as implementation diverging from concept. Here there was no implementation at all. The drift was document-to-document, which the taxonomy does not currently name. See "Residual" below.

Observation

Three documents each defined a milestone sequence for the same project:

Document	Sequence
INTENT.md § Initial Milestones	M0–M3
docs/TestDriverConceptModel.md § 15	M0–M3 (different content)
docs/TestDriverInitialMilestones.md	M0–M10

The two M0–M3 sequences disagreed with each other and both disagreed with the M0–M10 sequence. M2, for instance, denoted "Adaptation and Crystallization" in one document and "Test-Driver Lab" in another — so an unqualified reference to "M2" was ambiguous across the corpus.

Why it matters

The project's own thesis is that implementations must not silently redefine intended behaviour, and that concept drift is a first-class finding. The corpus exhibited the failure it was written to prevent, before a single line of code existed. Left unresolved, every subsequent milestone reference in commits, workplans and evidence would have been ambiguous.

Resolution

Path 2 of §5 — the concept is deliberately revised.

docs/TestDriverInitialMilestones.md (M0–M10) is now canonical. It is the most complete of the three, is the only one carrying exit criteria and success metrics, and is the only one that names the lab, self-verification, the improvement loop and the compression review.

The other two sections were replaced in place with a superseded banner and a mapping table rather than deleted, so that references from earlier commits and from history/ remain interpretable.

Execution order is deliberately not the canonical order: workplans/TD-WP-0002-vertical-spike-crystallization.md drives one thin thread through canonical M1–M7 rather than completing each milestone in turn. Canonical sequence and execution sequence are now distinct and separately stated.

Residual

The finding taxonomy (§9) has no class for divergence between concept documents — CONCEPT_DRIFT is defined as implementation-vs-concept. This finding was classified CONCEPT_DRIFT as the nearest fit.

Carry into TD-WP-0002-T10 (compression review): either widen CONCEPT_DRIFT to cover intra-conceptual inconsistency, or accept that pre-implementation document drift is not a framework finding at all and should be handled as ordinary editorial hygiene. Do not add a new finding class before that question is answered — the taxonomy is already larger than the evidence supporting it.