SkillVaultskills Browse all 500 skills

Product Management · Version 1.0.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

PRD Assumption Stress Tester

Make a product decision about assumption inventory and requirement ambiguity review with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 6 documented failure modes 5 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Reviews a product requirements document for unsupported user assumptions, missing edge cases, unclear success metrics, dependency risk, and solution decisions disguised as requirements.

₹149 one-time

Get this skill archive

What this skill helps you do

  • Assumption inventory
  • Requirement ambiguity review
  • Success metric design

How PRD Assumption Stress Tester works

You provide

Suite structure, failure history, and the risk to cover

It inspects

Nondeterminism sources affecting assumption inventory

It decides

A requirement ambiguity review plan at the cheapest useful level

You verify

The test fails when the behavior is broken, not only passes

What it checks first

PRD Assumption Stress Tester reviews a product requirements document for unsupported user assumptions, missing edge cases, unclear success metrics, dependency risk, and solution decisions disguised as requirements. Use it when the work involves Assumption inventory, Requirement ambiguity review, Success metric design.

  1. Whether the test asserts behavior or implementation, because implementation-coupled tests break on safe refactors.
  2. Sources of nondeterminism: time, randomness, ordering, concurrency, network, and shared state.
  3. Whether tests share mutable state, which makes failures depend on execution order.
  4. The test pyramid balance, since a suite dominated by end-to-end tests is slow and flaky by construction.
  5. Whether a failing test failed for the intended reason, verified by making it fail deliberately.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • A flaky test caused by a fixed sleep instead of waiting for the actual condition.
  • Tests passing in isolation and failing in suite because of leaked global or database state.
  • Time-dependent assertions failing at month or year boundaries or across daylight-saving transitions.
  • Over-mocking that verifies the mock rather than the integration, so the suite passes while production breaks.
  • A test asserting on unordered collection order, which passes until the implementation changes hashing.
  • Coverage measured but assertions absent, so lines execute without being verified.

Answers it will reject

  • Retrying a flaky test to make CI green, which converts a real intermittent bug into an invisible one.
  • Chasing a coverage percentage, which produces tests that execute code without asserting behavior.
  • Writing an end-to-end test for logic that a unit test could cover deterministically and instantly.
  • Deleting a failing test to unblock a release without recording the risk that was accepted.

Decision rules it applies

  • Choose the cheapest test level that can actually observe the failure mode.
  • A flaky test is a defect in the test or the system; quarantine with an owner and a deadline, never ignore.
  • Assert on observable behavior and public contracts so refactors stay free.
  • Every bug fix gets a test that fails before the fix and passes after it.

Evidence it asks for

  • Run the suite in randomized order to expose inter-test dependencies.
  • Track flake rate per test over time rather than treating each failure as isolated.
  • Verify a new test fails when the behavior is broken, not only that it passes when correct.

The method inside

  1. Separate the customer problem from requested solutions
  2. Inventory assumptions and strength of evidence
  3. Compare options using impact, confidence, risk, effort, and reversibility
  4. Define success, guardrails, and the decision after new evidence

Deliverables

  • Assumption inventory evidence map
  • Requirement ambiguity review option and risk analysis
  • Success metric design decision memo

Evidence requirements

  • Customer research, usage, support, and commercial evidence
  • Strategy, constraints, dependencies, and opportunity cost
  • Experiment design, roadmap options, or requirements artifact

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Stress-test this PRD before engineering estimation and identify what we still need to learn.

Expected output

The PRD assumes users want real-time alerts, but interviews only establish a need for faster awareness. Offline behavior, notification ownership, and the success threshold remain undefined...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Assumption inventory: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Requirement ambiguity review: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Success metric design: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Using request volume as a substitute for impact
  • Presenting a prioritization score as objective truth

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.