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defect-escape-taxonomy

Use when a defect has been confirmed in production and the team must name which class of gap let it through before deciding what to build. Classifies it as a test, process or tooling gap and one of thirteen sub-patterns at the earliest layer that should have caught it, with the fix, without blame.

Quality

87%

Does it follow best practices?

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SecuritybySnyk

Passed

No findings from the security scan

The canonical home for this skill is testland/defect-escape-taxonomy

SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Content

81%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

An unusually actionable instruction skill: the decision rule, tables, checklists, and worked example let Claude execute the classification immediately and correctly, with strong validation gates in the procedure. Its weakness is token efficiency — extended quotations and definitional padding that a competent model does not need — and a monolithic body that could offload the worked example and rationale to the existing references directory.

Suggestions

Trim 'The blameless constraint' to its operational rules — keep layer-as-grammatical-subject, how-not-why, and the blame-scan word list; cut the multi-sentence Google SRE Book and Etsy quotations, which restate blameless-postmortem culture Claude already knows.

Compress the four full ISTQB definition block quotes (defect, escaped defect, root cause, confirmation testing) to the cited term plus a short phrase; the complete sentences cost tokens without changing how the classification is performed.

Move the full worked example (and optionally the category 'signature' prose) into a references/ file alongside the document template, keeping the classification rule, sub-pattern tables, and procedure inline in SKILL.md.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The taxonomy, classification rule, procedure, and worked example are dense practitioner knowledge that earns its tokens, but there is real padding a reader must skip: multi-sentence block quotations from the Google SRE Book and Etsy guide in 'The blameless constraint' (e.g. "If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams...") restate blameless-postmortem culture Claude already knows, and four full ISTQB definition quotes (defect, escaped defect, root cause, confirmation testing) could be cited in a phrase each. This fits anchor 3 — mostly efficient with unnecessary explanation that could be tightened — rather than anchor 2, since the core operating content is not padded.

3 / 5

Actionability

Guidance is fully executable end to end: a 3-step decision rule with stop conditions, a discriminator ("can write the test today" vs "cannot write the test today"), three sub-pattern tables with typical fixes, a grep-able skip-marker checklist ("skip, only, xfail, Ignore, continue-on-error: true"), a blame-scan word list, and a complete copy-paste-ready vitest regression test in the worked example. The non-code categories get concrete asset shapes ("a process-heap-usage metric with a rolling one-hour window alert"), and the full document template is one reference away, so the common cases are covered as anchor 5 requires.

5 / 5

Workflow Clarity

The 7-step Procedure is clearly sequenced with explicit validation checkpoints: an entry gate ("Confirm the input is a defect... Classify nothing"), asset verification ("Verify the asset against the introducing commit... An asset that would have passed against the buggy code is not a prevention asset"), and a final scan (step 7's blame scan, "Every hit is a rewrite"). Error-recovery guidance is present ("If none fits, say so explicitly rather than forcing the nearest match"), matching the anchor-5 pattern of explicit validation, feedback loops, and checklists; no destructive/batch cap applies since the skill produces a document, not mutations.

5 / 5

Progressive Disclosure

The single bundle file is well handled: the body links to references/escape-defect-document-template.md (a real file, verified), it is one level deep, and it is clearly signaled at the point of need in 'Expected output shape'. However, the ~320-line body keeps everything else inline — the full 50-line worked example and the citation-heavy blameless rationale are candidates for the same references/ treatment — so structure is good with minor organization gaps rather than the clean overview-plus-split of anchor 5.

4 / 5

Total

17

/

20

Passed

Description

87%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

A strong description: it states a precise, distinctive trigger scenario and a concrete, quantified classification output in third person with no fluff. The only improvement space is broader natural-vocabulary coverage ("bug", "escaped", "postmortem") and slightly richer action variety.

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

The 'what' is one primary action rendered concretely — "Classifies it as a test, process or tooling gap and one of thirteen sub-patterns at the earliest layer that should have caught it, with the fix, without blame" — naming the exact scheme, its cardinality, and the outputs. It sits above anchor 3 (which expects only 1-2 loosely specified actions) but below anchor 5, which expects several distinct concrete actions rather than one classification action with rich elaboration.

4 / 5

Completeness

Both halves are explicit: the trigger clause "Use when a defect has been confirmed in production and the team must name which class of gap let it through before deciding what to build" gives a concrete when-scenario, and "Classifies it as a test, process or tooling gap and one of thirteen sub-patterns... with the fix" gives a clear what. This matches the anchor-5 pattern of explicitly answering both what and when with concrete trigger phrasing, and the 'Use when' clause is present so no cap applies.

5 / 5

Trigger Term Quality

Good natural coverage: "defect", "confirmed in production", "gap", "test", "tooling" are phrases a user in this situation would say. A few natural terms are missing — notably "bug" (the most common synonym for defect), "escaped", and "postmortem" — so it does not reach the comprehensive synonym coverage of anchor 5, but it clearly exceeds the partial coverage of anchor 3.

4 / 5

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The niche — naming which checking layer let a confirmed production defect through — is narrow and the trigger phrase "must name which class of gap let it through before deciding what to build" is distinctive; it would not fire for generic incident response or postmortem-writing requests. Overlap with adjacent postmortem skills is minimal, matching anchor 5 rather than the 'minor overlap risk' of anchor 4.

5 / 5

Total

18

/

20

Passed

Validation

100%

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 16 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository

testland/qa

Path

plugins/qa-bug-repro/skills/defect-escape-taxonomy/SKILL.md

Reviewed

Table of Contents

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