Mission Chains

A Mission Chain is a connected sequence of missions that forms one user or system flow. Missions measure per-unit correctness. Chains measure end-to-end readiness. A release with 200 green missions can still ship a broken signup if one link in the chain is unverified.

This is one page in the family of concepts for working with large changes. See also the Mission Atlas, which places chains between feature areas and individual missions.

Why chains

Reviewing missions one at a time answers "is this unit correct?" It never answers "can a real user get through the journey?" Those are different questions:

• A mission can be fully verified while the mission before it in the flow is not.
• A flow can be blocked by a single missing step even when every other step is green.
• A "done" feature area can still have no working end-to-end path.

Chains make the journey a first-class thing you can check.

Shape

New Customer Signup
  RegisterUser
  -> VerifyEmail
  -> CreateWorkspace
  -> InviteTeamMember
  -> AcceptInvite
  -> LoginUser

A chain has a name, the journey it represents, an ordered list of missions, a readiness verdict, and a weakest link. The readiness of a chain is bounded by its weakest step: one partial or drift mission caps the whole chain.

Readiness verdicts

• ready , every step is verified and in sync.
• at_risk , the chain works but at least one step is only partially verified.
• blocked , a step is drifting, missing, or unverified enough that the journey cannot be trusted.

Worked example

The customer portal example declares three chains (mission-chain-map.json):

Every mission in Subscription Billing passes intent check, yet the chain is blocked, because CreateCheckoutSession is drifting and ActivateSubscription has no passing test. That gap is invisible if you review missions one file at a time.

Where chains come from (planned)

Chains are detected from mission inputs, outputs, and references. The command intent chains ./intent is planned and owned by the SkillsTech Compiler; this repo teaches the concept and ships the example fixture that shows its output shape.