Q3 LTI Evolution Decision

Decision

Evolve the current Live Testing Interface instead of starting a parallel clean-room rewrite during Q3.

The current application already provides the costly control-plane foundations:

• scheduled tests and maintenance work;
• donation, petition, Stripe, GoCardless, PayPal, Salesforce, Sentry, FRAPI, Asana, and email helpers;
• scenario import and versioned Agentic QA suites;
• an authenticated Agent API with leases, idempotency, evidence, and terminal run aggregation;
• a private local visual runner and outbound runner bridge;
• Cloud Run service and scheduler delivery with candidate smoke and promotion.

The greenfield package at specs/005-live-testing-interface-greenfield-rebuild/ is the normative target. Observed implementation behavior does not override that contract.

Tradeoffs

Benefits

• Preserves working operational and reporting behavior.
• Lets Q3 effort focus on executable cross-system scenarios.
• Supports incremental replacement behind explicit contracts.
• Keeps one source of run history and evidence.

Costs

• Legacy Django, Selenium, and provider helpers remain temporarily.
• Some existing configuration and documentation require consolidation.
• Adapter boundaries must be introduced carefully around older checks.

Rejected default

A full rewrite is rebuild-ready but is not the default Q3 implementation. It would require re-proving scheduling, recurrence, provider behavior, reports, Agent API security, runner reliability, and deployment before adding scenario coverage.

Migration Path

1. Treat the existing Agent API and scenario models as the control plane.
2. Add target-aware adapters for acceptance Website, backend, DonUI, FRAPI, MODB, Iterable, and approved payment sandboxes.
3. Prefer direct API assertions for data and health. Use browser automation for browser state, rendering, interaction, redirect, and payment UX behavior.
4. Version scenarios and evidence so a failing replacement can fall back to the previous version without changing expected business outcomes.
5. Replace legacy helpers only after equivalent contract tests and one accepted sandbox run exist.

Promotion Gates

• CI and migration checks pass.
• Synthetic adapters pass without production credentials.
• A candidate web revision passes authenticated health checks.
• The scheduler uses the same verified image only after web promotion.
• Provider sandbox evidence is reviewed by a human.
• No unresolved secret, production-write, or cleanup finding remains.