Human time belongs at gates and escalations, not inside repetitive build loops. The ADLC uses five named checkpoints where human judgement approves direction, accepts risk, and authorizes release.
Gate governance
Every gate has a human owner, explicit criteria, and a fail state. If the criteria are not met, work returns to the prior stage with evidence-backed feedback.
Clear problem, success criteria, and scope.
Precise requirements, testable criteria, constraints.
Task graph, dependencies, and guardrails.
Tests passed, decisions reviewed, risk accepted.
Deployment, monitoring, and rollback readiness.
Detailed checkpoints
The ADLC keeps agents moving quickly inside execution loops while concentrating human review at the highest-leverage decision points.
Before specification begins, the Product Owner confirms the team is solving the right problem. Ambiguous intent causes downstream specs, plans, and builds to drift.
The Tech Lead ensures requirements are precise enough for agents to execute and for gates to verify. Vague requirements create plausible but wrong outputs.
Before execution, the Sponsor approves the task graph, dependencies, resource commitment, autonomy levels, and guardrails that bound agent action.
QA reviews the evidence package, agent decisions, known failure modes, and risk posture. Passing tests alone is not sufficient for release readiness.
The Engineering Manager authorizes production release only after deployment sequencing, monitoring, rollback, and on-call coverage are confirmed.
The core insight
In agentic development, human review should not be spread thin across every micro-decision. Gates concentrate judgement where it changes outcomes.
“A gate is where human responsibility becomes explicit. Without named gatekeepers and clear criteria, oversight is theater. With them, oversight becomes governance.”
Prashant Dhingra, Agentic Development Lifecycle Framework
Why it works
Gates let agents move fast without removing human accountability.
Human attention is applied to the five decisions that matter most instead of thousands of agent micro-decisions.
Agents execute, test, and self-correct within each stage without waiting for constant human review.
Each gate has a named owner, making approval responsibility clear and auditable.
When a gate fails, work returns to the prior stage with specific evidence-backed gaps.
Every gate sign-off becomes a documented decision point for regulated and enterprise environments.
Gates complement sprint review, PR review, release readiness, and existing engineering governance.
Continue the ADLC series