Practices

The practices support the pillars, each with a class of tools beyond the ones the pillars rely on:

• Skills support the consistency and continuity pillars by checking specifications against guides and changes against policies where linters and detectors fall short, and by handing checks over to them once code can express those checks.
• Emulators support the continuity and conformance pillars with mocks and emulators that consumers run on demand instead of shared test environments, so consumers verify migrations before they switch versions and rely only on what contracts describe.
• Toolkits support the continuity and conformance pillars with SDKs and CLIs that absorb API changes behind stable interfaces, so consumers update toolkits instead of their code, and that expose only what contracts describe.