# Decision Contract Template

## Purpose
Use this template to define a decision in a way that is explicit, versioned, testable, and governable.

## Audience
- Decision owners
- Product and policy teams
- Risk, compliance, and engineering stakeholders

## 1) Contract Metadata
- Contract name:
- Contract ID:
- Version:
- Owner:
- Approval authority:
- Effective date:
- Review cadence:

## 2) Decision Scope
- Decision type:
- Business objective:
- In-scope systems or processes:
- Out-of-scope systems or processes:
- Impact classification:

## 3) Inputs
- Required inputs:
- Optional inputs:
- Input sources:
- Validation rules:
- Missing-data behavior:
- Reliability and confidence handling:

## 4) Constraints and Policy Rules
- Policy thresholds:
- Allowable ranges:
- Required approvals:
- Escalation conditions:
- Hard-stop or deny conditions:
- Override conditions and authority:

## 5) Outputs
- Deterministic outcome values:
- Returned constraints:
- Escalation outputs:
- Human-review path:
- Downstream action expectations:

## 6) Evidence Contract
- Trace ID format:
- Stable reason code set:
- Version stamp requirements:
- Required evidence fields:
- Retention expectations:
- Audit or review audience:

## 7) Monitoring and Operations
- Key health or quality metrics:
- Alert conditions:
- Manual review triggers:
- Incident ownership:

## 8) Validation
- Test scenarios:
- Regression checks:
- Adversarial or misuse cases:
- Acceptance criteria:

## 9) Change Control
- Promotion gates:
- Required approvals for change:
- Backward-compatibility expectations:
- Rollback criteria:
- Rollback steps reference: