Activities

HELIX names seven activities in software development: Discover, Frame, Design, Test, Build, Deploy, Iterate. Each owns a defined set of artifact types. Work moves between them: a vision change propagates downstream, a failing test reveals a design gap, a production metric revises the PRD. The activity names describe a kind of work, not a position in a sequence.

       ╭──── Discover ────╮
       │                  ↓
   Iterate ←─── Frame ───→ Design
       ↑                  ↓
       ╰── Deploy ←── Build ←── Test

Each activity produces a defined set of artifact types. Authority flows from higher-level activities (Discover, Frame) toward lower-level ones (Build, Deploy), but feedback flows freely in all directions: implementation reveals missing requirements; a deploy-time gap surfaces an ADR question; an iterate-activity metric revises the vision.

Discover

Validate the opportunity before committing to building anything.


Purpose	Research the market, users, and technical feasibility
Location	`docs/helix/00-discover/`
Key artifact types	Product Vision, Business Case, Competitive Analysis, Opportunity Canvas
Output	A validated opportunity worth pursuing

Frame

Turn the opportunity into actionable requirements.


Purpose	Define the problem, establish requirements, and scope the work
Location	`docs/helix/01-frame/`
Key artifact types	PRD, Feature Specifications, User Stories, Principles, Stakeholder Map, Risk Register
Output	Requirements clear enough to design against

Frame also selects the project’s active cross-cutting concerns and establishes design principles that govern downstream judgment.

Design

Architect the solution approach.


Purpose	Make technology and architecture decisions before writing code
Location	`docs/helix/02-design/`
Key artifact types	Architecture, ADR, Solution Design, Technical Design, Contract, Data Design, Tech Spike
Output	Design contracts that tests can verify

Solution designs are feature-level. Technical designs are story-level slices that inherit from a solution design.

Test

Encode requirements and designs as executable specifications: failing tests that define what “done” means.


Purpose	Turn requirements and designs into executable specifications
Location	`docs/helix/03-test/`, `tests/`
Key artifact types	Test Plan, Story Test Plan, Test Procedures, Test Suites, Security Tests
Output	Failing tests that define behavior

Tests are the contract between design and implementation. Code must satisfy tests, not the other way around.

Build

Implement code to make the failing tests pass.


Purpose	Write the minimum code needed to satisfy the tests
Location	`docs/helix/04-build/`, source code
Key artifact types	Implementation Plan
Output	Passing tests, committed code

Implementation is complete when the tests pass.

Deploy

Release the work to production with observability and operator guidance.


Purpose	Safely deliver the built software to users
Location	`docs/helix/05-deploy/`
Key artifact types	Deployment Checklist, Monitoring Setup, Runbook, Release Notes
Output	A production rollout with observability and operator guidance

Iterate

Learn from real signal and feed it back into the loop.


Purpose	Review what shipped, capture learnings, inform the next cycle
Location	`docs/helix/06-iterate/`
Key artifact types	Improvement Backlog, Metric Definition, Metrics Dashboard, Security Metrics
Output	Findings, metrics, and follow-up work that feed the next iteration

Iterate closes the loop: alignment reviews, experiments, and metric analyses produce inputs to the next pass through Discover or Frame.

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