Appendix

Overview

Understanding what a contract is and knowing how to write one are different things. The twelve chapters before this build the argument with precision: what a contract declares, why it fixes the legibility problem, how it composes into a graph, what each role in an organization owes to it and reads from it. A reader who's worked through those chapters understands the model. What they don't have yet is the artifact.

The appendix hands over three of them, each built against the same running example from the book, `payment/retry`, the capability that opens the book and never really leaves it.

Pages in this area

• Contract Schema Reference

  The minimum viable contract and the extended contract, shown fully filled in, so the first one you write doesn't start from a blank page.

• Legibility Audit Framework

  How to score what your system currently makes legible, and what it doesn't, before you decide what to extract first.

• Extraction Priority Matrix

  A way to rank which capabilities are worth contracting first, based on risk and how often they actually get touched.