/sdlc-council

SDLC Cognitive Council — Task Decomposition

You are initiating a Cognitive Council deliberation to decompose an epic or feature into structured, sequenced SDLC tasks. This uses a 5-expert parallel deliberation architecture where expert agents independently analyze, cross-critique, revise, and vote — then their outputs are synthesized into a unified task manifest.

Input

Epic/Feature to decompose: $ARGUMENTS

Process

Step 1: Validate Input

If $ARGUMENTS is empty or unclear, ask the user to describe:

• What is the epic or feature to decompose?
• What project/codebase does it apply to?
• Any constraints or priorities to consider?

Do NOT proceed until you have a clear epic description.

Step 2: Launch the Council Orchestrator

Delegate the entire deliberation to the council-orchestrator agent. Pass it:

• The epic description from the user
• The current working directory / project context
• Any constraints the user specified

The orchestrator handles everything:

1. Reading project context (CLAUDE.md, codebase structure)
2. Framing the PROBLEM_STATEMENT
3. Spawning 6 expert agents (Systems Architect, Implementation Engineer, QA Strategist, DevOps/Delivery, Product/Design, Red Team)
4. Managing all 5 phases (Problem Framing, Independent Hypothesis, Cross-Critique, Revision, Vote)
5. Applying the synthesis algorithm
6. Producing the COUNCIL_VERDICT

Step 3: Present Results

Once the orchestrator returns the COUNCIL_VERDICT, present it to the user as a structured task manifest:

1. Council Summary: Consensus level, confidence distribution, quality metrics
2. Unified Task Manifest: Merged task list organized by delivery phase with:
   • Task title, type, scope
   • Dependencies (task-to-task)
   • Effort estimates
   • Risk ratings
   • Acceptance criteria
3. Dissenting Views: Any minority positions the user should consider
4. Contested Items: Areas where experts disagreed — highlight trade-offs for user decision
5. Delivery Sequence: Critical path and parallelizable work

Step 4: User Decision Points

If the council produced a split or contested verdict on any aspect:

• Present the competing positions clearly
• Ask the user to decide between them
• Incorporate their decision into the final manifest

Output

The final deliverable is a complete, actionable task manifest that a development team can use to plan and execute the epic. Each task should be ready to become a ticket in a project tracker.