Standards
The authoritative platform standards for every repo in the estate. Each standard is defined here first and inherited everywhere else — repos never carry their own divergent copies. Standards are delivered three ways: the HCS Governance MCP serves them to AI clients at session start (scope-aware), this public site is the human and offline reference, and each repo's AGENTS.md carries a minimal fallback digest with links back to these pages.
| Standard | What it governs |
|---|---|
| Governance | Hard rules, commit format, work-item references, review gates |
| Scripting | PowerShell 7+ everywhere — headers, strict mode, error handling |
| Automation | Pipelines, scheduled jobs, and the unified runner model |
| Infrastructure | IaC conventions for Terraform, Bicep, and ARM |
| Testing | Pester unit tests, validation profiles, coverage expectations |
| Variables | Variable naming, layering, and no-inline-secrets rules |
| Naming | Resource, repo, and artifact naming conventions |
| Key Vault | Single-source-of-truth secret management |
| Documentation | Markdown-only docs, draw.io diagrams, commit prose |
| Documentation platforms | Sanctioned docs frameworks and per-repo assignments |
| Agents (multi-model) | Canonical AI-tool layout: AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md shim, per-tool configs |
| AI workspace | The .ai/ directory contract — session state and durable memory |
| Solutions | Solution-level repo structure and composition |
| Provisioning | Environment and resource provisioning flow |
| Examples | Worked examples that accompany the standards |
| Authoring standards | How standards themselves are written and changed |
| Build environments | The 4-tier runner priority and build-host rules |
| ADO project strategy | Solution vs per-repo project model (ado_model) and Title-Case naming |
| Work items | Work item types, hierarchy, and required detail |
| Work item sync | Split source of truth — GitHub masters Issues/Bugs/Feature-Requests, ADO masters the planning hierarchy |
| GitHub Issues | Native GitHub issue types/fields/labels, roadmap marker, no-reinvention policy |
| Project management | Authoritative trackers, reusable read-only PMO boards, and restricted publication |
Standards carry a scope header (hcs, tierpoint-prodtech, or azurelocal). Only the hcs scope is published here; scoped variants are served exclusively through the HCS Governance MCP to the repos they apply to.