Step 06 — Sign-off: the §9 verdict

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Beat: Check, completed by the human. Touch point #2. The bundle is AWAITING_SIGNOFF; you've cleared §6 (step 05); now you record the verdict in §9. This single decision is the only thing standing between a built fix and a shipped one — by design, no model can make it.

The four dispositions

pdca signoff <id> --accept        # the fix is good → COMPLETE, ready to publish
pdca signoff <id> --iterate-do    # right spec, wrong build → rebuild against same brief
pdca signoff <id> --iterate-plan  # the spec itself was wrong → re-author the brief
pdca signoff <id> --discontinue   # this doesn't belong in the cycle → abandon

Each maps to a state transition the driver applies the instant you record it:

--accept is guarded (the C6 rule from step 05): it's refused while any §6 item is unchecked. The other three are not — you can redirect or abandon a bundle with §6 still open. Add --by "Name" to set attribution and --delta "…" to record the rationale on an iterate.

--discontinue is the disposition this harness version (v0.18.0) unified — the action, the discontinued §9 outcome, and the terminal DISCONTINUED state now all share one word. Use it for work that, on inspection, doesn't fit the cycle (handled out-of-band, duplicate, won't-fix) — a deliberate abandon, independent of §6.

The simple case — accept

For issue 11589 (steps 03–05), the gates proved correctness and the four §6 items were all cleared, so the maintainer accepted. The real results/issue_11589/SUMMARY.md §9:

## 9. Check sign-off                     ← human completes Check here
- Disposition confirmed / overridden:
- Outcome: merged-wider
- Iteration delta (if iterating):
- By / date: Eduard Ralph / 2026-06-06

Outcome: merged-wider ⇒ state COMPLETE. The bundle is frozen and ready for publish (step 07).

The instructive case — iterate, with a real reason

Acceptance is the boring path. The cycle earns its keep on iteration — when the human catches something the gates can't. gramps issue 46 (a GraphView import-safety fix) took two iterations before it was accepted. The brief's own carry-forward records why the first attempt was rejected — this is a real --iterate-do rationale, verbatim:

## Iteration 1 — carry-forward (from the previous attempt)
- Sign-off rationale: Reject: the regression test reimplements GTK load/version-
  pinning (test_graphview_import.py:80-82, top-level `import gi` +
  gi.require_version("Gtk","3.0")). GTK loading/pinning is already owned by gramps
  at runtime and by PR 950 in unit testing, so this machinery must not be in the
  addon test — it is redundant and is the likely cause of the two T3 addon-unit
  exit-2 collection aborts. Rebuild the test without any manual gi/Gtk pinning;
  keep the production change (removal of the two import-time raises) as-is.
  Re-run T3 addon-unit and E2E ...

What happened mechanically:

1. Iteration 1 built a fix whose production change was correct but whose test carried redundant GTK-pinning machinery. The C4 gate went green (the fix worked), but the human noticed the test introduced two new [delta] failures in the T3 addon-unit matrix — a regression the test itself caused.
2. The maintainer ran pdca signoff 46 --iterate-do --delta "rebuild the test without the gi pin; keep the production change". The driver archived the attempt into iteration-v1/, reverted to PLANNED, and re-ran the builder — which got the rejection rationale folded into the brief (above), so it didn't repeat the mistake.
3. Iteration 2 rebuilt the test without the pin. Accepted:

## 9. Check sign-off
- Outcome: merged-wider
- Iteration delta (if iterating): [iteration 2 — rebuilt test without gi pin]
- By / date: Eduard Ralph / 2026-06-13

The lesson this case teaches about the harness: the deterministic C4 gate said "correct," and it was right — but "correct fix" is not "good contribution." A test that pins GTK is correct and redundant and regression-inducing; only the human reading the §6/§7/review material caught it. The harness didn't prevent the mistake — it surfaced it cheaply (the [delta] rows), gave the human a clean "reject with reason" lever (--iterate-do --delta), and carried the reason forward so the rebuild started smarter. That carry-forward loop is the "Plan with a better baseline" arrow of PDCA, operating inside a single contribution.

State after accept: COMPLETE. On to publish and the cross-cycle Act review — step 07.

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