FitSD — Origins

Non-normative. Where this came from, and what it owes.

FitSD didn’t start as a framework. It started as a job.

A good deal of the thinking comes from time spent running solution-development gating at UKCloud, a UK cloud provider where new services passed through a two-gate review before anyone committed real engineering effort, and again before they were allowed near production. The gating worked. It killed weak ideas early and stopped half-built things going live. But it was built for a large, regulated organisation — heavy, multi-director sign-offs, plenty of ceremony. The shape was right; the weight was wrong for a small team.

FitSD is that shape, stripped back. The two gates survive. The “is it actually ready to run?” close-out survives — and got sharper, turning into the Definition of Done. The director triage doesn’t. Two ideas were worth keeping from that experience: effort should be earned at a gate, and “done” means operable, not just built. Everything else was sized down from a department to a handful of people.

To be plain about what this is and isn’t: FitSD is informed by that experience, not copied from it. No organisation’s internal documents are reproduced here. This is a clean rebuild from first principles — the lessons kept, the paperwork left behind. Everything in this repository is original work.