Utility · read once now, skim every Monday
Risk patterns
Technical faults have the Week 12 ladder; this table is for the other kind, the project-level failure patterns that build quietly for two weeks and surface as a crisis. Each has an early-warning sign you can check in a minute, and a rescue that works at the warning stage and barely works later.
Six patterns, six rescues
| Pattern | What it looks like | Early-warning sign | Rescue move |
|---|---|---|---|
| The scope cliff | A feature too big to leave the system demonstrable: "we are rewriting the node this week, nothing runs meanwhile" | Any plan whose honest status will be "in progress" at the next milestone | Slice it into rungs that each walk, or shelve it; the rung list is renegotiable, the demonstrable rule is not |
| The silent pair | Partners working apart, discovering divergence at merge time; one stand-up answer unchanged for two sessions | No mid-week check-in happened, or the journal has one handwriting | Run the stand-up today, in person; re-divide this week's work explicitly; if the silence has a cause, say it to the teacher this Monday, not at D4 |
| Works-on-my-bench | Each half verified only on its author's machine against remembered contracts; integration keeps "finding bugs" that are really disagreements | docs/topics.md older than the last contract change | Stop; update the contract file; rebuild both stubs from the file, not memory; re-run the joining order from Week 12 |
| The single-board hostage | All progress blocked because the hardware is in one bag and that bag is elsewhere | "Could not work on it, no board" appears once in a stand-up | Invoke the boards agreement; and remember half the system needs no node: broker, rule, bridge and page all run against mosquitto_pub |
| The Friday feature | A new rung started inside the freeze window, or the night before a milestone, breaking what walked | Any "quick addition" proposed after the week's end-to-end check has gone green | Revert to the tag that walked (git checkout the milestone tag proves it still does); demo that; queue the feature honestly for the next week |
| The narrated demo | Milestone slides describing what the system does instead of the system doing it; "it worked at home" | You cannot run the three-step demo (cause, travel, name) right now, from main, in three minutes | Make the end-of-session check a standing habit, today; if a milestone is at risk anyway, demonstrate the diagnosed partial with its half-split evidence, which is worth real credit, and narration is not |
The Monday self-check
Sixty seconds, before each stand-up, one yes or no per pattern: is next week's plan all rungs, no cliffs; did the mid-week sync happen; is docs/topics.md newer than the last contract change; do we both know where both boards are; is anything new proposed inside a freeze; can we demo from main right now. Six yeses, proceed. Any no names this week's first conversation, and the bands table tells you what it costs to leave it.
Raising it early
Project-level trouble is studio material exactly like technical trouble: a pair that says "pattern two, the silence has a reason" on November 23 gets a workable re-plan and four weeks to execute it; the same sentence on December 7 gets sympathy. The teacher has seen every row of this table before, which is why the table exists; the brief and the course outline say how formal cases (a partnership that must change, an accommodation) are handled, and the only wrong move is sitting on one.