Examples

The measure of a methodology is whether it helps practitioners think more clearly. These examples are evidence, not instruction.

Three worked ICR cycle examples across different domains and delivery contexts.

What Each Example Shows

Each example follows the same structure:

• Domain and stakes — what the project is and what goes wrong if an assumption is wrong
• ICR cycle walkthrough — FORMALIZE → STRESS → CHECK → SURFACE → GATE
• What changed — how the project was different because the cycle ran

The examples are illustrative but grounded in realistic delivery scenarios. The stress tests, conflicts, and residue items are representative of what GDD actually surfaces in practice.

The Three Examples

Legacy Banking Rule Extraction

Domain: Credit approval logic in a 40-year-old COBOL core banking system
Stakes: Regulatory compliance, incorrect approvals or denials at scale, audit exposure
Context: Phoenix Runtime pipeline being prepared to modernize the legacy system

The ICR cycle surfaces a regulatory vs. policy ambiguity in the DTI threshold, a self-employed applicant branch with 1987 logic, and reason codes mapped to a table not updated since 2011 — none of which were visible from the COBOL code alone.

Multi-Agent Enterprise Procurement

Domain: Purchase order approval workflow across a mid-size manufacturing enterprise
Stakes: Financial exposure from incorrect approvals, audit trail gaps, vendor relationship risk
Context: Five OCTO agents being configured to automate procurement routing

The ICR cycle surfaces a race condition in the confirmation webhook, a budget double-approval exposure from batch-updated committed spend, and a probationary vendor status that the binary agent model silently misroutes.

AI-First Feature Development

Domain: Loan origination feature in a fintech product
Stakes: Regulatory compliance, incorrect lending decisions, user trust
Context: Development team preparing to hand a feature spec to an AI coding agent

The ICR cycle surfaces four decisions the two-paragraph spec did not make: the self-employed path, adverse action notice requirements, product-specific score thresholds, and variable income calculation — all of which the agent would have had to silently decide on its own.

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Contributing an example

If GDD helped you surface an assumption or catch a conflict in a real project, the most valuable contribution is a documented example. A good example has at least one [CONFLICT] that surprised you and an honest account of what changed because the cycle ran. Open a PR →