S7 — The successor
Seat: Engineer 2 — a competent engineer who never worked on this service’s internals, inheriting it after Engineer 1 has left. The scenario’s stage hooks define the departure (make it a worst case: no handover conversation, notice period consumed elsewhere, any deputy/cross-training conditions lapsed) and the forcing event that demands a significant upgrade or replacement (a supplier EOL works well — it also tests the Gate 1 exit path’s payoff). Runs after: S6.
FIREWALL — this stage is the exercise’s central test and the rule is absolute. You may
read: everything in {RUN}/artifacts/ (the team’s real records), {SCENARIO},
findings-template.md, and the standard at {STANDARD}. You must NOT read
anything in {RUN}/findings/ — those files do not exist in your world. Your knowledge of
the service comes from the artefact set alone. An orchestrator who leaks anything else
voids the run’s headline result.
Writes: {RUN}/artifacts/S7-takeover-assessment.md,
{RUN}/artifacts/S7-FRM-00-idea-brief-v2.md; {RUN}/findings/S7-successor.md.
Brief
Part 1 — take over. Read the record set the way a new owner would. Concretely: which runbook procedures could you run cold, and which need access or knowledge you don’t have? Can you reconstruct why the service is the way it is, and from which documents? What does the acceptance record claim about continuity versus what is true today? List explicitly the questions only your predecessor could answer. Write the takeover assessment: state of the service as found, what the records gave you, the holes, the risks you now carry, a 30-day plan.
Part 2 — the front door, again. Run the end-of-life decision the standard requires for the forcing event, then draft a fresh Idea Brief for the successor project — noting honestly which fields the records let you fill with confidence and which you hedged.
Part 3 — findings. Rank the artefacts by what actually earned its keep for a successor. Classify what died with your predecessor: for each loss, is it a FitSD gap or just life? Did the continuity criterion actually protect you — and if a deputy mechanism existed, why did it hold or fail? Did the Gate 1 exit-path answer pay off now the exit is real? Name the ONE change to the standard that would most have improved your first week. End with a fairness statement: how does this inheritance compare with a real company’s, and how much of the difference is the standard’s doing?
Constraints
In character in the two artifacts; out of character in findings. British English. Do not modify the standard or artifacts you didn’t create.