# Backlog work-intake membership test

The `backlog_item` entity admits a kind **only** if it passes the
work-intake membership test:

> A backlog item is a latent unit of work intent that can be triaged,
> prioritised, and promoted into a slice, and whose standing fits the
> work-status lifecycle (`open|triaged|started|resolved|closed`).
>
> **If a candidate does not fit the work-intake lifecycle, it is not a
> backlog item.**

This is a normative invariant, not advice. It governs every future
entity-kind decision, not just backlog.

**Admitted kinds (the five glossary-reserved):** issue, improvement, chore,
risk, idea. `risk` is admitted because it is *unresolved work-risk* —
uncertain future harm that may need mitigation/acceptance/expiry/promotion —
not as a general epistemic record. `problem` is excluded until it earns a
reserved id + a decomposition boundary distinguishing it from `issue`.

**Excluded (fail the test — epistemic/governance, different lifecycles):**
assumptions (held→validated), decisions (proposed→accepted→superseded — and
the decision/governance family already owns these; ADR ships), questions,
findings, tradeoffs, constraint statements. Putting any of these in the
backlog would break the uniform work-status lifecycle and duplicate an
existing family. Their home is a risk facet, ADR (high-impact decisions),
or the `knowledge_record` family (assumption/decision/question/constraint,
each with its own lifecycle).

**Two further rules from the same model:**
- Each kind carries a discriminating boundary; when several fit, precedence
  resolves deterministically: `risk > issue > improvement > chore > idea`.
- `status` (whether active) is orthogonal to `resolution` (why it stopped),
  and both are distinct from kind facets (descriptive shape only). No
  close-reason — accepted, expired, duplicate, promoted, wont_do — is ever
  encoded as a `status` state *or* stored in a kind facet; e.g. a risk facet
  is likelihood/impact/origin/controls, and its accepted/expired exit is the
  item-level `resolution`.

Why: the backlog is the capture layer for *work intent*. Conflating it with
truth-state (assumptions) or governance-state (decisions) is the drift this
rule prevents — "backlog is not the home for every unresolved thing; it is
the home for unresolved work intent."
