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Delivery Risk & Scope-Decision Tracking #37

Description

@yjmaxpayne

Overview

A living tracking issue for the project's identified delivery risks, their
observable trigger conditions, pre-committed mitigation actions, and the
scope-reduction ladder to apply if delivery capacity is exceeded. The goal
is to make scope-cut decisions explicit and pre-agreed rather than
improvised under pressure, and to keep "compress quality" explicitly off
the table as a mitigation.

Background

This is a capacity-constrained project with limited maintainer bandwidth.
Rather than silently slipping deadlines or silently cutting corners, risks
and their mitigations are written down ahead of time so that when a trigger
condition is observed, the response is already decided.

Core Objectives

1. Maintain the risk register

  • Numerical-precision risk: bath coefficient precision insufficient after a
    backend/precision change
  • Performance-regression risk: a generalization pass degrading a previously
    specialized fast path
  • Packaging-maturity risk: wheel build CI instability
  • Physics-boundary risk: unit/frame/rotating-frame ambiguity between HELIX
    and its consumer
  • Partitioning-feasibility risk: multi-GPU strong-scaling POC failing
  • CPU-performance risk: CPU backend falling short of a useful fraction of
    single-GPU throughput
  • Upstream-API risk: a reference library's HEOM API introducing a breaking
    change
  • External-resource risk: limited access to multi-GPU test hardware

2. For each risk, record

The observable trigger condition, the specific scope/plan change it causes,
and the escalation threshold if the mitigation itself doesn't resolve it.

3. Maintain an explicit, ordered scope-reduction ladder

Apply one cut at a time, observe before applying the next. Never apply
"reduce correctness tolerance" as a mitigation.

4. At each shipped increment, log

What shipped, any risk triggered, what scope was deferred as a result, and
what risk to watch for the next increment.

Success Criteria

Metric Target
Every active risk has a written trigger condition and mitigation 100% coverage
Scope reductions applied one at a time with an observation window process followed
Mitigations that loosen a correctness tolerance 0 instances

Dependencies

Cross-cutting; informed by all other Epics, blocking none of them.

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