Specify

Write what would make this right — before anything is built. Two questions settle here: what will be actioned, and what will be provable.

The output is a set of specifications, and they are written so that they fail. A specification that has never failed has never demonstrated that it tests anything; writing it first is what stops the evidence being shaped around whatever happened to get built.

Criteria

A criterion is one statement of what would make the work right, written here before anything is built. A step, a measure or a marker — whatever can be driven and shown to hold.

Criteria are what turn understanding into evidence. "The problem is understood" cannot be checked by anyone; a criterion can. Most are encoded as specifications and run; the rest are followed, and their result recorded.

Every item has criteria, including a chore nobody outside will ever see.

Where a criterion is a measure, the measure must be the goal. "Responses under 200ms" qualifies. "Improve throughput" does not — it is a proxy, and specifying a proxy is how a target quietly replaces the thing it stood for.

Specifications

An executable statement of what the system should do. The only thing that can prove a capability — and a capability usually needs several, each proving one case.

A specification cannot be recovered from the implementation. The implementation says what a system does, never what it should do — so intent has to come from outside it: the original request, the conversation that produced it, the outcome that was shaped. A record of current behaviour is a safety net, not a specification; it becomes one only when someone accountable confirms that the behaviour was intended. Where no source of intent exists anywhere, nothing can be specified, and that absence is itself a finding.

Every type is specified; only a capability becomes a stated one. A chore still has to say what would make it right — it simply produces no outcome anyone can be told about afterwards.

Done when: every criterion is written, and each one can be driven.

Verified when: someone who did not write them confirms they are adequate — that meeting all of them would genuinely mean the work was right.