Odoo grill

Grill the plan

Before writing Odoo code, interrogate the plan — one question at a time, each carrying your recommended answer — and walk the design tree to its leaves. The grill produces decisions, not code; it pre-empts the rework that surfaces when a wrong assumption is only discovered mid-implementation. Implementation starts after the plan survives, not before.

If the codebase can answer a question, read the code instead of asking. Wait for the answer before the next question.

Question lenses (walk the tree through these)

1. Functional before technical. What does the customer actually need to happen? Could a setting, an automated action, Studio, or an existing module deliver it with zero custom code? Why does this need a new module — or any code — at all?
2. The Odoo dimensions. Multi-company, multi-currency, multi-language, multi-warehouse, multi-website: which apply, and what happens at each boundary? Invent a concrete scenario per applicable dimension and make the plan resolve it.
3. Record rules & access rights. Which groups see this, and which do it? What record rules apply? What does a user outside the group experience — and what's exposed on portal?
4. Upgrade safety. Does every schema choice survive the next migration? Which xml_ids will customer data reference? What does the eventual upgrade of this code look like?
5. Edge cases. Invent scenarios that stress the concept's boundaries: 100× the data, in-flight records (draft / posted / done) at deploy time, the empty set, the duplicate. Make the plan account for each.

Conduct

• Cross-reference the source. When a claim contradicts the module or core code, read it and quote it back: "_compute_x already sets this on account.move — which one wins?" The code is the tie-breaker, not the assertion in the plan.
• Sharpen fuzzy terms. "'account' — res.partner, account.account, or res.users?" An ambiguous noun hides two forked designs.
• Stop when the remaining questions wouldn't change the design. Grilling past that point is theatre.
• Close with a short summary of what got decided. Surface the durable decisions for the user — the ones future work should know about. They can be folded back into the skills via the learning loop; see refining-odoo-skills / skills/_journal.md.