Graduating a Pilot to Available

A pilot entry is in active use by at least one team but hasn’t been validated broadly enough to recommend to everyone. Available means TD is confident it’s ready for general adoption. The graduation process is lightweight by design — it’s a check, not a ceremony.

Criteria for graduation

All three must be true:

1. Real adoption. At least two teams (outside TD) have used the entry in production or production-equivalent conditions.
2. Known failure modes. The owner can state clearly what the entry doesn’t do, what breaks it, and how to recover.
3. Maintained. There’s a plan for keeping the entry current. “Maintained” means someone will review it every 6 months and update the lastReviewed date.

Process

1. Owner opens a merge request on the catalog repo changing stage: pilot to stage: available in the entry’s frontmatter.
2. Update usedBy in the same MR to reflect the adopting teams.
3. Add or update outcome — a one-line result that tells evaluators what impact the entry had.
4. TD reviews the MR within 5 business days. If the criteria are met, it merges. If not, TD will comment with what’s missing.

What happens to the lastReviewed date

Reset it to the graduation date. The 6-month stale clock restarts from graduation.

Retiring instead

If a pilot isn’t gaining traction and isn’t being maintained, it should be retired rather than left to go stale. Set stage: retired and optionally set replacedBy if something supersedes it.