Waypoint™ Non-Functional Requirements and Service Quality

1. Purpose

This specification defines cross-cutting quality requirements for Waypoint™.

Because Waypoint™ coordinates autonomous workers and may mutate external systems, correctness, durability, security, recoverability, and auditability are more important than simple request/response availability.

2. Reliability

Waypoint™ shall:

• persist lifecycle and run state durably;
• tolerate process restarts;
• avoid losing approved work or external identifiers;
• recover from transient provider failures;
• distinguish known failure from unknown/ambiguous state;
• reconcile external state after ambiguous operations;
• prevent duplicate destructive side effects where practical.

3. Idempotency

Externally mutating operations should use deterministic idempotency keys or equivalent provider mechanisms where available.

When providers do not support idempotency, Waypoint™ should:

• probe before retry;
• store external identifiers immediately;
• reconcile by deterministic markers;
• require human review for unsafe ambiguity.

4. Availability

Availability objectives should be defined separately for:

• interactive UI/API;
• background orchestration;
• execution dispatch;
• webhook ingestion;
• reporting.

Temporary UI unavailability must not corrupt long-running work.

Critical background execution should resume after service recovery.

5. Performance

Initial targets should be established during implementation testing.

Product expectations:

• common UI/API reads should feel interactive;
• decision/gate actions should acknowledge promptly;
• project dashboards should load from reporting projections rather than expensive live provider aggregation;
• scheduling/readiness evaluation should handle many work items without serial provider calls;
• bulk synchronization should use batching/concurrency controls.

6. Scalability

The architecture should support growth in:

• projects;
• work items;
• workers;
• concurrent execution runs;
• events;
• evidence;
• external integrations;
• reporting history.

Scaling should be possible by domain/background worker without requiring immediate decomposition into many microservices.

7. Concurrency

Waypoint™ must safely handle:

• multiple users editing/reviewing;
• multiple agents executing;
• multiple streams;
• simultaneous provider events;
• scheduler races;
• duplicate webhook delivery.

Use optimistic concurrency, transactions, leases, unique constraints, or equivalent controls.

8. Consistency

Strong consistency is required for:

• approvals;
• reservations;
• execution authorization;
• version activation;
• high-risk governance decisions.

Eventual consistency is acceptable for:

• dashboards;
• external projections;
• non-critical reporting;
• some synchronization state.

The UI should not present stale projections as authoritative when that matters to safety.

9. Security

Waypoint™ shall apply:

• least privilege;
• secure authentication;
• role/policy-based authorization;
• encryption in transit;
• encryption at rest where applicable;
• secrets management;
• credential isolation;
• secure webhook verification;
• input validation;
• dependency/security scanning;
• audit of privileged actions.

10. Secrets

Secrets must not be stored in:

• project Markdown;
• prompts;
• Jira descriptions/comments;
• source control;
• general application logs.

Use secure secret references and short-lived credentials where possible.

11. AI security

Agent context should be treated as potentially untrusted input when sourced externally.

Controls should address:

• prompt injection;
• malicious repository/document content;
• tool misuse;
• data exfiltration;
• over-broad credentials;
• unsafe generated commands;
• untrusted external links/content.

Critical authority must be enforced outside model instructions.

12. Privacy and data minimization

Workers should receive only context required for their task.

Waypoint™ should support:

• data classification;
• restricted worker/provider routing;
• redaction;
• retention policies;
• deletion where legally/operationally appropriate;
• audit access controls.

13. Auditability

Material actions must be attributable.

Audit should include:

• human;
• AI worker;
• automation;
• external system;
• action;
• subject;
• outcome;
• timestamp;
• correlation/run ID.

Audit records should be tamper-resistant/append-oriented appropriate to risk.

14. Observability

Waypoint™ should provide:

• structured logs;
• metrics;
• traces/correlation;
• health checks;
• run status;
• queue depth;
• provider failures;
• worker health;
• reconciliation failures;
• reporting freshness.

Operational telemetry and governance audit are separate concerns.

15. Recoverability

Waypoint™ should support:

• restart/resume;
• replay-safe event processing;
• execution reconciliation;
• delivery reconciliation;
• backup/restore of canonical data;
• artifact recovery;
• documented disaster recovery.

Recovery procedures should be tested.

16. Backup and disaster recovery

Implementation should define:

• RPO;
• RTO;
• database backup;
• artifact backup;
• secrets/provider recovery dependencies;
• restore validation.

Targets may vary by deployment tier but must be explicit before production use.

17. Data integrity

Use:

• referential integrity;
• version constraints;
• immutable approved versions where appropriate;
• checksums for important artifacts/evidence;
• uniqueness for idempotency/external mappings;
• transactional outbox or equivalent event consistency pattern.

18. Maintainability

Waypoint™ should enforce:

• modular domain boundaries;
• automated tests;
• clear APIs;
• migration/version discipline;
• architecture decision records;
• maintained documentation;
• static analysis/linting;
• dependency management.

19. Documentation quality

Project documentation should be buildable as a documentation site.

Where MkDocs Material is used, CI should run a strict documentation build before relevant merges.

Documentation changes required by a work item should be part of its completion criteria.

20. Source-control quality

For software implementation, project policy should support:

• feature branches;
• detailed pull requests;
• required ticket/work traceability;
• automated validation of PR requirements;
• required CI;
• protected promotion paths;
• clean temporary workspaces/worktrees.

Exact branch strategy remains configurable.

21. Testability

Waypoint™ itself should include:

• unit tests;
• integration tests;
• contract tests for adapters;
• workflow/recovery tests;
• concurrency/idempotency tests;
• end-to-end lifecycle tests;
• security tests;
• migration tests.

External-provider tests should use safe test environments where possible.

22. Adapter resilience

Provider adapters should implement:

• timeouts;
• bounded retries;
• rate-limit handling;
• circuit-breaker/backoff where useful;
• idempotency/reconciliation;
• clear error taxonomy;
• provider request IDs;
• telemetry.

23. Accessibility and usability

The UI should:

• support keyboard use;
• meet reasonable accessibility standards;
• clearly distinguish automated versus human actions;
• make risk/gate state understandable;
• avoid hiding critical status behind color alone;
• present complex execution state progressively.

24. Human attention quality

A key service-quality goal is minimizing unnecessary human interruption.

Waypoint™ should measure and improve:

• approval wait time;
• unnecessary approval frequency;
• repeated questions;
• false escalations;
• decision clarity.

Autonomy should not create notification fatigue.

25. Cost efficiency

Waypoint™ should track major variable costs where feasible:

• AI/model usage;
• agent runtime;
• cloud resources;
• CI/CD;
• external APIs.

Cost telemetry should support project attribution.

26. Reporting quality

Reporting data should have:

• defined freshness;
• metric definitions;
• source traceability;
• authorization;
• historical correctness;
• reconciliation monitoring.

Material reporting-projection failures should be observable.

27. Compatibility and versioning

Waypoint™ should version:

• APIs;
• artifact schemas;
• adapter contracts;
• event schemas;
• skills where material.

Backward compatibility should be maintained when practical.

28. Retention

Retention policies should distinguish:

• canonical project history;
• approvals/audit;
• evidence;
• execution logs;
• telemetry;
• temporary workspaces;
• AI context.

Temporary workspaces should be cleaned automatically after successful completion and reconciled after failure.

29. Service-level indicators

Potential SLIs include:

• API availability/latency;
• scheduler delay;
• execution dispatch latency;
• webhook processing delay;
• run recovery success;
• external reconciliation backlog;
• reporting freshness;
• failed delivery rate;
• stuck execution count.

Formal SLO values should be established based on deployment tier and measured behavior.

30. Initial production-readiness bar

Before production use, Waypoint™ should demonstrate:

1. durable lifecycle state;
2. backup/restore;
3. secure identity/secrets;
4. audit;
5. safe concurrency/reservations;
6. idempotent/reconciled provider mutation;
7. pause/stop;
8. execution recovery;
9. delivery recovery;
10. observability/alerting;
11. automated test coverage of critical workflows;
12. reporting projection health;
13. documented operational runbooks.