Review quality

Review Quality Framework

This skill defines what a reviewer must verify before implementation work advances to completion. It applies whether the reviewer is the orchestrator directly or a delegated subagent.

The review gate exists because implementation agents optimize for getting things working, not for verifying they built the right thing. Without a structured review checkpoint, planned work gets silently dropped, tests get written to pass rather than to verify, and unnecessary complexity accumulates. The review is where these failure modes get caught.

Critical separation of concerns: The reviewer must not be the same agent that wrote the code or the tests. An agent reviewing its own work will rationalize rather than evaluate. The reviewer reads, runs, and reports — it never fixes. If issues are found, they go back to the implementation agent for resolution.

This is the same principle the needs-test-author trait applies one step earlier, to test authorship itself — the test author must not be the implementer, for the same rationalize-not-evaluate reason. Verifying that separation actually held (see "Independence verification" in Area 3) is this rule applied to test authorship, not an optional extra.

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Getting Started

The reviewer is given an MCP item ID. Use MCP tools and codebase access to gather what you need — do not expect context to be pre-loaded for you.

1. Load the item's notes — query_notes(itemId=..., includeBody=true) to retrieve the planning note and implementation-notes. The planning note's key depends on the item's schema: feature-summary (feature-implementation), task-scope (feature-task), or diagnosis (bug-fix).
2. Read the changed files — use the implementation notes to identify which files were modified, then read them directly. Review the actual code, not just summaries.
3. Run the test suite — execute the project's test command and capture the results. Do not assume tests pass because the implementation agent said they did.
4. For items carrying the needs-test-author trait — load the trait's test-plan and test-manifest notes via query_notes(operation="list", itemId=..., includeBody=true), which carries the test author's own commit SHA range field, and obtain the orchestrator-provided per-child SHA table (Pre-SHA/Post-SHA/Test-Pre-SHA/ Test-Post-SHA) plus any declared orchestrator fixture-repair commit SHAs from the review handoff, for cross-checking. A trait-bearing item with no test-plan note is a blocking issue on its own — do not proceed to the Area 3 independence verification until the note exists.

If the planning note (feature-summary / task-scope / diagnosis) or implementation notes are missing, the review cannot proceed. Report this as a blocking issue.

Before reporting any file or artifact as missing, or any behavior as broken, verify with a direct check — Read the exact expected path, an exact-path Glob, or a reproduction — rather than inferring absence from one plausible directory or from a prior bug's pattern. Two review false-positives reached verdicts this way before being caught downstream.

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Review Areas

These four areas form the minimum review. Each one catches a different class of failure. If the review surfaces additional concerns, include them — this is a floor, not a ceiling.

1. Test Suite Verification

Run the test suite before anything else. Everything downstream depends on knowing the actual state of the tests.

Run ./gradlew :current:test and capture the output. Record the total test count and the pass/fail breakdown.

If tests fail: Document every failure — test name, assertion message, and the file where the test lives. Do not attempt to fix failures. Do not speculate about whether failures are pre-existing or new. Report what you observe. Test failures are a blocking issue — the item cannot advance with a failing test suite.

If tests pass: Record the count and move on.

2. Plan Alignment

Compare what was built against the planning note (feature-summary / task-scope / diagnosis). The goal is to catch drift in both directions — work that was planned but not done, and work that was done but not planned.

Check each acceptance criterion. Walk through the acceptance criteria from the planning note one by one. For each criterion, identify the specific code change that satisfies it. If a criterion has no corresponding implementation, flag it — either the work is incomplete or the criterion was intentionally descoped (which should appear in the implementation notes).

Check for unplanned changes. Review the changed files for modifications that don't trace back to any acceptance criterion. Unplanned changes aren't automatically wrong — sometimes implementation reveals necessary adjacent work. But they should be acknowledged and justified in the implementation notes, not silent.

Check non-goals weren't violated. Review the planning note's non-goals list. If the implementation touched areas that were explicitly scoped out, flag it.

3. Test Quality

The planning note's test strategy defined what should be tested — happy paths, failure paths, and edge cases. The reviewer verifies that the tests actually deliver on that strategy, not just that they exist and pass.

This is where the separation of concerns matters most. The agent that wrote the tests has an inherent bias toward believing they're correct. An independent reviewer can evaluate whether the tests verify real behavior or just confirm that code runs.

Map tests to the test strategy. For each scenario in the planning note's test strategy, identify the corresponding test. Missing coverage is a gap to report.

Evaluate test substance. Watch for these patterns that produce green results without catching real bugs:

• Tautological assertions — asserting something equals itself, or that a non-null value is not null, without verifying the actual value is correct.
• Mock-heavy tests that verify nothing real — every dependency mocked, test only confirms mocks were called in order. Mocks are fine for isolation, but the test must still assert something meaningful about the unit's output or state change.
• Happy-path-only coverage — if the test strategy called for failure paths, those tests need to exist and need to verify the failure behavior is correct (right exception type, right error message, right fallback behavior).
• Overly broad assertions — result != null or list.isNotEmpty() when specific values, sizes, or contents should be checked. These pass even when the implementation is wrong.
• Assumption escapes — assumeTrue (or an equivalent guard) gating out a real failure instead of asserting against it, so the test silently skips rather than reporting the bug it was written to catch.
• Implementation-derived oracles — an expected value computed from the implementation's own formula or output rather than from an independent oracle source. These pass by construction and verify nothing.

Check edge cases. Verify each boundary condition from the test strategy has a corresponding test. If implementation notes documented new edge cases discovered during development, check whether tests were added for those too.

Independence verification (items with the needs-test-author trait). When the item carries this trait, verify the test-author/implementer separation actually held before trusting anything else found in this area — a compromised separation undermines every other finding above it:

• Separation held. Confirm the test files were introduced within the test author's commit range, not the implementer's — check git log over both ranges using the test-manifest's commit SHA range field together with the orchestrator's per-child SHA table. Record the result as independent when actor and commit-range separation both hold, independent-degraded (temporal-only) when only ordering separates them (for example a Direct-tier bug-fix run in single-actor mode), or not-independent when separation did not hold. Any silent implementer edit to a test file after the author's range is a blocking issue, regardless of whether the edit looks benign — except orchestrator fixture-repair commits that were declared in the review handoff (listed with their SHAs). Those are not silent edits; verify they touched only construction/ setup code, never assertions, before excluding them from the blocking rule.
• Manifest maps to spec scenarios. Cross-check the test-manifest's S-id-to-test mapping against the test-plan's numbered scenarios (S1…): every scenario must be marked covered or explicitly not-covered with a reason. Do not take "covered" on faith — open at least two of the claimed tests and read their bodies to verify the claimed coverage is real.
• Oracle spot-check. Pick one non-trivial scenario and trace its expected value back to the oracle source recorded in the test-plan (spec clause, stated algorithm, or external reference). If the expected value matches what the implementation produces but not what the named oracle source specifies, that is a blocking issue — it means the oracle was derived from the implementation rather than the spec.
• Arbitration record. Every ambiguity the test author flagged must have a named resolver in the manifest's arbitration record. Give oracle-degraded scenarios — ones where the oracle source itself was uncertain — a second, closer look.

4. Simplification

The reviewer does not run /simplify — that pass belongs at the feature level, not per-task review. Check the implementation notes for whether /simplify was run during implementation.

If /simplify made changes, verify those changes have test coverage. This is the one thing the reviewer checks here — not the simplification itself, just whether the resulting code is tested. Report coverage gaps; do not re-run simplify or evaluate its judgment calls.

If /simplify was not run or made no changes, there is nothing to check in this area — move on.

Coverage gaps found here are not blocking unless they leave a structural change entirely unverified.

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Review Output

The review produces a review-checklist note on the MCP item. Structure the note around findings, not process.

Verdict

Every review must end with a clear verdict:

• Pass — all acceptance criteria met, tests pass and have substance, no blocking issues. The item can advance. An independence-verification result of independent-degraded (temporal-only) maps to Pass — record it in the audit note as the observed mode, not as a finding; it is the sanctioned outcome for Direct-tier single-actor runs, not a degradation to flag.
• Fail — blocking issues — test failures, missing acceptance criteria, critical gaps in test coverage, or (for items with the needs-test-author trait) a not-independent independence-verification result or an unexplained implementer edit to test files. These fail the item even when the test suite is green — a compromised separation makes a passing suite untrustworthy. The item must go back for fixes before it can advance. List every blocking issue.
• Pass with observations — no blocking issues, but simplification findings or minor test quality concerns worth addressing. The item can advance, but the observations should be tracked for follow-up.

Findings Format

Report every finding you observe, at every severity. Do not withhold minor findings and do not apply a high-severity-only bar — current models follow severity filters literally, which suppresses real findings. Mark each finding blocking or observation and state your confidence; the orchestrator's verdict handling (see Verdict, above) is the downstream filter, not your own judgment about what is worth mentioning.

For each finding, state:

• What was expected (from the planning note or test strategy)
• What was found (in the code or test output)
• Severity (blocking or observation)
• Confidence (how sure you are this is a real issue, not a false positive)

Be specific. "Tests could be better" is not actionable. "Test testCreateItem asserts only that the result is not null — it should verify the item's title and status match the input parameters" is actionable.

Gate Enforcement

The reviewer does not advance the item. It fills the review-checklist note and reports the verdict. The orchestrator reads the verdict and decides whether to:

• Advance the item (pass or pass-with-observations)
• Send the item back to the implementation agent with the blocking issues list (fail)

A failing verdict with clear findings gives the implementation agent exactly what to fix without ambiguity.