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ADR-0038: continuous owner feedback loop and a standing design authority

  • Status: Accepted (owner sign-off is the merge of the PR that carries this ADR, 2026-08-05)
  • Date: 2026-08-05
  • Amends: ADR-0026 (the acceptance practice in step 4 and the review-role roster in step 3; the batch mechanics, decision gates, and bookkeeping close-out stand unchanged)

Context

ADR-0026 step 4 assumes the owner reviews behavior per epic batch — effectively a UAT walkthrough at each acceptance. Practice after roughly three sprints: that walkthrough happened once, partially. This is not a discipline failure to be exhorted away; it is the same structural fact ADR-0026 and ADR-0036 already recognized — one owner, whose attention is the scarcest resource in the project. A process step that requires a scheduled block of owner time per batch will keep not happening.

Meanwhile the opposite channel works without being designed: day-to-day use of the live instance produces a steady stream of concrete observations (loading affordances, visual drift, ambiguous warnings, missing view options). Until 2026-08-05 these had no defined intake — the owner’s choice was to interrupt with unstructured notes or to sit on them until a review session that rarely comes. The first triaged dump (_bmad-output/planning-artifacts/feedback-triage-2026-08-05.md) showed the mode works: of the observations reported, several were already tracked (#560, #568, #572) — pipeline dedup is exactly the work an agent should be doing, not the owner.

The same dump confirmed a second structural gap. The project has a design spec from one early session (DESIGN.md + EXPERIENCE.md, 2026-06-12, tracked in #356) but no standing role that holds a consistent design language while features ship. The owner’s expectation of the UX role — that it critiques aesthetics, consistency, and UX simplicity on an ongoing basis — was never wired into the workflow. The result is visible drift: text-only tabs next to an icon-based menu, bare text-field date pickers, explanatory prose dumped under charts in violation of the project’s own UX-DR11 tooltip rule, inconsistent loading placeholders. Every one of these passed review, because no review role was looking.

Decision

  1. Feedback intake is continuous, and the agent carries the structuring cost. The owner drops observations at any time, in any form, unsorted. The PM agent triages each dump into a dated planning-artifacts/feedback-triage-YYYY-MM-DD.md: cluster, check the pipeline for existing coverage, route to epics/ADRs/decision gates, and propose next steps. The owner reviews the triage — minutes, not hours — and confirms or corrects routing. Only then are thin issues created per the issue-tracking convention. Design-affecting items go through a design pass before implementation stories are cut.
  2. Owner acceptance stays at the merge, unchanged. The behavior review against the reviewer briefing (ADR-0026 step 4) remains the acceptance act. What this ADR removes is the fiction of an additional per-epic owner UAT session; systematic screen-by-screen evaluation happens when the owner chooses to do it, and its findings enter through the same feedback intake.
  3. The UX designer role becomes the standing design authority. It owns a living design-language spec (starting by refreshing and promoting the 2026-06-12 DESIGN.md + EXPERIENCE.md), and design decisions route through it the way architecture decisions route through ADRs.
  4. The agentic review closing act gains a design-critic role. Alongside the correctness hunter, edge-case hunter, and UAT persona (ADR-0026 step 3), every batch with user-visible surface is reviewed against the design-language spec for visual consistency, aesthetic quality, and UX simplicity. Design drift becomes a review finding on the branch, not an owner discovery months later.

Consequences

  • No observation waits for a review slot, and no owner session is spent on transcription or deduplication.
  • The owner’s recurring costs shrink to two small, well-defined acts: confirming a triage and accepting a batch.
  • Design consistency gets an enforcement point with teeth (a review role and a spec to hold work against) instead of an aspiration.
  • On acceptance of this ADR, AGENTS.md’s Epic-Batch Workflow section is updated in the same PR: step 3’s role roster gains the design critic, and step 4 drops the implied per-epic owner walkthrough.
  • Risk: triage documents accumulate as paperwork. Mitigation: they stay short, live in planning-artifacts/, and items the owner does not confirm within a reasonable time are dropped rather than carried forward — the live instance will resurface anything that still hurts.