Boundary Audit

The Boundary Audit is the monthly ceremony where the Principal Systems Architect reviews domain boundaries for structural integrity, catching architectural drift before it compounds into systemic problems.

As agents generate code at scale, architectural drift accumulates in ways that are difficult to detect at the individual PR level. Modules develop unwanted dependencies, bounded contexts leak across domain boundaries, naming conventions erode, and structural patterns diverge from Golden Samples. Each individual violation may be minor, but over weeks the cumulative effect undermines system modularity and increases maintenance cost.

The Boundary Audit addresses this through three structured activities:

1. Run automated architecture constraint tests — execute the full suite of structural tests against the current codebase, not just against new PRs. This catches violations that slipped through incremental checks or that emerged from the interaction of multiple individually-compliant changes. The results feed directly into the Architectural Violation Rate.
2. Flag new violations since last audit — compare current results against the previous month's baseline to identify new boundary crossings, dependency direction violations, or naming convention departures. New violations are categorized as either regressions (patterns that were previously compliant) or expansions (new code areas that were never covered by constraints).
3. Update Golden Samples if patterns have evolved — when the codebase has legitimately evolved and existing Golden Samples no longer represent current best practice, update them. This is a critical step: outdated samples cause agents to generate code in a style that conflicts with the team's current approach, driving down the Pattern Consistency Score.

The Boundary Audit typically runs two to three hours and produces three outputs: an updated violation report, a list of constraint rule changes, and any revised Golden Samples. These outputs feed into the next cycle of agent execution, closing the feedback loop between architectural governance and agent behavior.

The ceremony sits within the monthly cadence alongside Context Hygiene and the FinOps Review.