12. Who prepares a change before coding starts?

With AI, writing code is fast, so preparing good specifications becomes the slowest step. The methodology gives that work its own sprint, the spec sprint, which runs a step ahead of the implementation sprint. The custodians meet for one or two days and work through several requests together. The product owner drafts the specification from a standard template. Impact analysis reports everything the specification will touch. Each custodian reviews the report for their own layer: functional, design, architecture and code. Impact analysis can show that a change needs new items, and the custodians propose them in the specification; the items enter the graph only when their code merges. The finished specification, with its impact report, goes into the implementation backlog. The implementation sprint works from specifications whose risks are already known. A specification that turns out to be missing context goes back to the spec sprint.

On the site: Why a Separate Cadence · The Mechanics · What Happens in a Spec Sprint