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Ecosystem ART

Focus: The 10 constellation verticals, JV L2 partners, vendored ecosystem registries, vocabulary providers, cross-project federation. PI cadence: 10-week Program Increment with five 2-week iterations inside; last iteration is the Innovation & Planning (IP) iteration for PI close + system demo. Value streams served: Ecosystem (primary), Delegation (vocabulary providers + vertical packs).

Team topology (Skelton & Pais)

The Ecosystem ART spans repositories. It is a virtual team — every constellation and JV partner is an independent repo — coordinated through the FCC authority repo. Using Skelton & Pais topology vocabulary:

  • Constellation maintenance team — Stream-aligned team owned by Ecosystem Coordinator (EC) plus each constellation's Maintainer. Covers Ophiuchus, Serpens, Libra, Crater, Scutum, Norma, Pyxis, Vela, Columba, Caelum. Each constellation has its own repo at rollingthunderfourtytwo-afk/<codename> and its own VocabularyProviderPlugin. The stream is the per-constellation release cadence; teams align to it and carry constellation-domain expertise (healthcare, finance, legal, etc.).
  • JV coordination team — Stream-aligned team owned by JV Coordinator (JVC). Covers sister L2 projects (athenium, mnemosyne, ice_ext, research_center_ext) and the JV governance contracts. The stream is the cross-L2-project alignment cycle; outputs are JV bridge reports and governance compliance certificates.
  • Federation team — Complicated-Subsystem team owned by Vocabulary Drift Sentinel (VDS) + Semantic Taxonomy Engineer (STE). Owns src/fcc/federation/, src/fcc/data/objectmodel/ (175 YAML mappings), and the SHA-256 parity audit. Treated as a complicated subsystem because cross-namespace entity resolution demands specialist knowledge of 11+ namespaces + the 175 mapping files; every other team consumes the federation outputs rather than reimplementing them.
  • Vocabulary-bridge team — Enabling team owned by SAFe-FCC Bridge Interpreter (SFBI). Owns the canonical SAFe↔FCC vocabulary reconciliation table (../safe-fcc-vocabulary.md) and bridge reports when vocabulary drifts across ecosystem projects. Enables the Constellation + JV teams by removing vocabulary-translation friction at PI boundaries.
  • Pattern harvesting team (shared) — Enabling team served by Pattern Harvester (PHV), the 115th persona landing in v1.4.4. PHV mines upstream-worthy patterns from sibling repos, surfaces candidates via the pattern-absorption-proposal.md issue template, and coordinates absorption decisions. This pattern was first proven in v1.4.1 with the ice_ext absorption.

PO / PM / RTE mapping

  • Product Owner (PO) — JV Coordinator (JVC). Owns the iteration backlog, prioritizes cross-repo stories, accepts completed work. One PO per iteration.
  • Product Manager (PM) — Ecosystem Coordinator (EC). Owns the PI backlog, authors PI objectives, aligns the Ecosystem ART with portfolio epics PE-005 + PE-009. One PM per ART.
  • Release Train Engineer (RTE) — Vocabulary Drift Sentinel (VDS). Facilitates PI planning, iteration reviews, system demos, and Inspect & Adapt. VDS owns the parity audits that gate release alignment, so RTE is a natural fit.

Cadence

  • Daily: async via cross-repo GitHub notifications + ecosystem-integration-tests CI gate.
  • Iteration (2 weeks): cross-project PR batches; VDS runs a parity-audit pass and publishes a provider-parity heatmap.
  • Backlog refinement: mid-iteration, asynchronous. JVC drafts cross-repo dependency sketches; EC confirms PI-fit; VDS resolves parity blockers. Roughly 3 hours of PO + PM time per iteration because cross-repo dependencies add coordination cost.
  • PI boundary (10 weeks): ecosystem PI scorecard from SMC aggregating constellation health + JV alignment + vocabulary parity. Constellation maintainers attend the PI review.
  • PI cadence aligns with RC's quarterly rhythm — see ../pi-calendar.md.
  • Innovation & Planning (IP) iteration: the final iteration of each PI is the IP iteration — reduced feature work, higher enabler-story density, bridge-report catch-up.

Backlog (PI-2026-Q3)

Populated at PI planning on 2026-06-30. Initial candidates:

  • Close the v1.4.1 ice_ext absorption: integrate ice_ext_element_mapping.yaml into the packaged vocabulary set, add the ice_ext provider to the VDS parity audit, and run cross-project federated search against it.
  • Advance PE-009 (POLARIS / LYRA integration): graduate POLARIS and LYRA from src/fcc/plugins/v1_5_preview/ to first-class plugin citizenship with full cross-reference matrix entries.
  • Expand ecosystem-integration-tests CI coverage to catch drift between FCC and each constellation's Maintenance release.
  • Advance PE-005 (advanced federation): scale NamespaceRegistry to 15+ namespaces with bi-directional resolution.
  • Maintain SHA-256 parity across all 13+ VocabularyProviderPlugins as providers evolve.
  • Author bridge reports via SFBI whenever vocabulary drifts across the multi-repo ecosystem.

Metrics signals

SAFe Metrics Crafter (SMC) aggregates these signals into the Ecosystem ART PI scorecard:

  • Provider-parity heatmap state (drift count per provider, rolling 4-PI trend).
  • Constellation repo health (CI green rate, release cadence, open issues).
  • JV alignment score (JV governance constitution compliance per partner).
  • Cross-namespace federated-search success rate.
  • Ecosystem-integration-tests CI gate pass rate.
  • Port-allocation conflict count (target: 0 — enforced by RC NEXUS v2.1.0 registry drift test).

Collaboration with sibling ARTs

  • Framework ART publishes pinned versions that this ART consumes. When Framework ART ships a breaking change, Ecosystem ART is responsible for updating all 10 constellations + JV partners.
  • Docs ART consumes Ecosystem ART outputs for audience tutorials (constellation-specific docs) and the plugin cookbook.
  • Vocabulary Drift Sentinel (VDS) feeds Forensic Auditor (FA) with parity findings for ecosystem-wide evidence graphs.
  • SAFe-FCC Bridge Interpreter (SFBI) feeds SAFe Metrics Crafter (SMC) with vocabulary translation hints so scorecards use canonical terms.
  • Pattern Harvester (PHV) scans Ecosystem ART PRs for patterns worth absorbing back into FCC core.

Quality gates

  • QG-ECO-001 — port-allocation parity against RC NEXUS v2.1.0 registry.
  • QG-ECO-002 — constellation repo release readiness.
  • QG-ECO-003 — VocabularyProviderPlugin SHA-256 parity across the 13+ providers.
  • QG-JV-001 — JV governance constitution compliance per partner.
  • QG-DGS-002 — Data Governance Integration gate extended to ecosystem partners.

PI objective template

Same SAFe template as the Framework ART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, Timed. 3-5 objectives per PI. Predictability band 80-100%. Below 60% triggers an Inspect & Adapt focused on cross-repo coordination friction (typically surfaces as vocabulary drift, port conflicts, or release-cadence misalignment between FCC and a constellation).

Cross-repo coordination

The Ecosystem ART is the most cross-repo of the three ARTs. To keep coordination tractable:

  • Every constellation repo must carry a ROADMAP.md (Layer 1), STRATEGIC_ARCHITECTURE_REVIEW.md (Layer 2), and AGENTS.md (Layer 3). TLDR audits presence and cross-layer consistency each PI.
  • JV partners honor the same three-layer convention.
  • Vocabulary mappings are versioned alongside the FCC release. A mapping schema change in FCC forces a provider-plugin bump across all 13+ providers before the FCC release is finalized.