full-development

Full Development Workflow

Use this workflow for feature requests, enhancements, refactors, and general tasks.

Phase 1: Understand & Plan

1. Read the Linear ticket thoroughly — understand the requirements, acceptance criteria, and any linked context.
2. Explore the relevant code to understand existing patterns and architecture.
3. Plan your approach: identify affected files, data flow, and potential edge cases.
4. Check for area-specific skills that may apply to the codebase you're working in.

Phase 2: Implement with TDD

Invoke superpowers:test-driven-development and follow its methodology:

• Red: Write failing tests that capture the expected behavior.
• Green: Implement the minimum code to make tests pass.
• Refactor: Clean up while keeping tests green.

Keep changes focused on the ticket — do not refactor unrelated code.

Phase 3: Verify

Invoke superpowers:verification-before-completion and follow its methodology:

• Run all relevant tests (unit, integration).
• Run lint and type checks on changed files.
• If any failures: fix the issue and re-verify (up to 3 attempts).
• Do NOT proceed to Phase 4 until all checks pass with evidence.

Phase 4: Integration Testing

This phase is mandatory when the change involves APIs, endpoints, services, middleware, or anything that runs inside Docker containers. Skip only for pure frontend changes or isolated utility functions with no runtime dependencies.

Unit tests with mocks cannot catch runtime integration issues like:

• Middleware ordering and interaction
• Auth flows through the full stack
• Service-to-service communication
• Database session scoping in async contexts

Steps

1. Restart affected services to pick up code changes. Wait for health checks to pass.

2. Test the happy path end-to-end. Make real HTTP requests that exercise the full flow:

   • Use curl to hit the actual endpoints through the running services.
   • Include authentication headers if the endpoint requires auth.
   • Verify the response status code AND body content.