IFEM phase · contracts
Contracts — IFEM Doctrine
Contracts freeze the shared agreement at the boundary so independent work does not reinterpret acceptance behavior in memory, meetings, or local code.
Purpose
A contract makes inputs, outputs, ownership, compatibility, errors, timing, and acceptance criteria explicit enough to be reviewed and checked.
Inputs and responsibilities
It receives the interface record and the decisions that determine what consumers may rely on, what providers promise, and what changes are breaking.
Outputs and artifacts
The artifact is a versioned interface contract with examples, error behavior, compatibility rules, ownership, and acceptance gates.
Verification and decision gate
Verification asks whether another contributor can implement behind the contract without inventing missing semantics and whether a breaking change is detectable.
Common failure modes
Acceptance behavior survives only in memory, examples omit failure cases, or versioning fails to communicate the compatibility boundary.
Execution notes
A contract is more precise than a descriptive paragraph because it states what can be checked. Examples should cover ordinary and failure behavior, compatibility should distinguish additive from breaking change, and ownership should identify who decides when the agreement evolves. This makes a handoff safer: implementation can proceed locally, while integration can reject behavior that falls outside the shared boundary.