Skip to content

queen: service levels with an error budget -- written targets, and dispatch slows when review falls behind #9974

Closed as not planned

Description

@gHashTag

Part of the dispatch roadmap epic #9976. Industry reference and the measured gap are below.

Measured 2026-10-17 14:37Z: 45 dispatched/h but 24 reviewed/h and 21 finished/h; 206 unreviewed. Dispatching faster than review can absorb only grows the queue and the holds (specs/queen/holds.t27). No target is written for idle lanes, review lag, unexpected exits or lead time, so no rule can act on them.

Industry reference: Google SRE SLOs with error budgets; Kanban WIP limits and Little's law (lead time = WIP / throughput); DORA lead time and change-failure rate.

User Scenarios

  • As the owner, I read one card with the swarm's targets: idle lanes while eligible work exists, review lag, unexpected-exit share, lead time p90, change-failure rate.
  • As the Queen, when unreviewed work exceeds what review clears in a set number of hours, I lower dispatch until it recovers instead of filling lanes with work that will only wait.

Requirements

  • Named targets as constants with the measured baseline in the comment: idle lanes 46% -> < 5% while eligible work exists; unexpected exits up to 78% -> < 2%; unreviewed 206 -> < 30; lead time p90 49.6 h -> < 6 h.
  • dispatch_allowance(free_lanes, unreviewed, reviewed_per_hour) -> u32 (a Little's-law WIP cap) and budget_left(events, bad_events, slo_permille) -> i32.

Success Criteria

  • Tests at the baseline numbers and at the targets; the allowance never exceeds free lanes and never drops below one when review is healthy.
  • 0 surviving mutants.

Rules for the bee

Boundary

  • specs/queen/slo.t27
  • .trinity/seals/queen_QueenSlo.json

Activity

  1. added
    shape-refusedClosed by the issue-shape gate (specs/policy/issue_shape.t27); a passing edit reopens it
    on Oct 17, 2026
  2. github-actions commented on Oct 17, 2026

    @github-actions
    Contributor

    Closed by the issue-shape gate (specs/policy/issue_shape.t27, #7498): an issue must have the template's sections. Edit the body; an edit that passes reopens it.

    • missing: ## Requirements -- numbered obligations, FR-001: ... MUST ...
    • missing: ## Success Criteria -- an outcome a machine can settle: a number with a unit, a backticked file, exit 0, or a backticked command
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    shape-refusedClosed by the issue-shape gate (specs/policy/issue_shape.t27); a passing edit reopens it

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions