0016: Separate Release Version, Owner Readiness, And Transferability Evidence

Status: Accepted

Context

STAGE 0.1 through 0.3 used one number to communicate two different things:

• compatibility and capability changes in the specification, schemas, plugin, and tools;
• empirical confidence gained from maps, trials, controlled changes, and adoption.

That coupling became contradictory after ADR 0006 established a personal Solo Unity profile. The owner can use and improve STAGE without waiting for unrelated maintainers, while the absence of independent adoption remains material to any claim that STAGE transfers broadly. A single version gate cannot state both facts honestly.

STAGE also exposes public, versioned artifact contracts. Semantic Versioning uses version changes to communicate public-API compatibility: incompatible changes increment the major version, compatible functionality the minor version, and compatible fixes the patch version. Encoding research confidence in the same number makes compatibility ambiguous.

Decision

STAGE will report three separate concepts.

Release Version

The repository release version communicates the stability and compatibility of STAGE's declared public contracts. Those contracts include the normative specification, supported artifact schemas, command-line interfaces, plugin and skill interfaces, and documented migration promises.

• 0.x means the public contract remains in initial development.
• 1.0.0 means the owner has declared and accepted a stable public contract, documented compatibility and migration policy, and removed or explicitly deferred critical release defects.
• Later major, minor, and patch changes follow compatibility semantics.

Independent adoption is not a prerequisite for 1.0.0. Its absence must still be disclosed wherever transferability is discussed.

Owner Operational Readiness

The personal workflow uses a separate, non-normative readiness statement:

Status	Meaning
forming	The workflow is incomplete or has not closed one accepted change loop.
operational	The owner has used it to frame, execute, rehearse, judge, and checkpoint a real project change.
repeatable	The owner has repeated accepted change work across at least two materially different projects or lifecycle phases and recorded correction and maintenance cost.
durable	Longitudinal use has exercised upgrades, resumption, recovery, and removal with acceptable owner overhead.

Readiness is evidence-backed but not a conformance score. A project may use only the STAGE practices that are proportional to its risks.

Transferability Evidence

Transferability remains a claim ledger rather than a scalar level. Reports must name the study type, independence, project shape, operations exercised, outcomes, and limitations. External maps, cross-engine operations, authorized controlled changes, and longitudinal adoption support different claims and are not interchangeable.

The absence of independent maintainers limits claims about independent maintenance outcomes. It does not block the owner's workflow or a stable release whose compatibility contract is ready.

Current Classification

At this decision:

• release contracts remain 0.3 and in initial development;
• owner operational readiness is operational;
• transferability evidence includes independent external maps and cross-engine operations, but no independent controlled change or longitudinal adoption.

This decision does not itself bump the release or artifact schema versions.

Consequences

• STAGE can optimize for its actual solo owner without manufacturing external adoption work.
• A future 1.0.0 decision must inventory and freeze public contracts rather than count unrelated maintainers.
• Research claims remain source-bounded and can still be strengthened if an external user appears later.
• Historical release notes retain their original reasoning but should point to this superseding decision where their old version-gate language could be read as current policy.
• ADR 0006 remains accepted, except its decision to leave general maturity claims unchanged is superseded by this ADR.