Real-User QA Planner

Plan QA as journeys real people walk, not test cases that accumulate. This skill owns the project's living QA docs — one committed tree (<qa-docs-path>, default docs/qa/) that every round appends to — and plans the persona-driven sessions qa-execution runs.

Two rules anchor everything:

1. Living docs, not round artifacts. All durable QA knowledge lives in the one committed tree; rounds append to it (structure, durability, and anti-patterns: references/qa-docs-layout.md).
2. Sessions, not cases. The atomic planning unit is the session charter (persona + journey + tour + time-box), derived from journey flowcharts. Coverage means "every planned journey was walked by a persona this cycle" — a session ledger, never a per-case count.

Each step points at the reference file that owns its contract; read that file before producing the step's deliverable — the inline text is a pointer, not the spec.

Required Inputs

• qa-docs-path (optional): root of the living tree; defaults to docs/qa at the repo root — a durable, committed location, never a temp dir. If the argument points outside the repository, confirm before proceeding: living docs outside the repo lose review, diff, and history.

Procedures

Step 1 — Resolve or bootstrap the tree. Read references/qa-docs-layout.md (canonical tree, gitignore block, bootstrap procedure, adoption procedure for scattered legacy artifacts). Resolve <qa-docs-path>. If the tree exists, read its README.md and scan scenarios/ and open bugs/ first, and build every decision below on that state; when the branch just merged parallel QA work, reconcile before planning — two files describing one behavior or one symptom fold into the older id (merge verdict fields by last_report recency, update references, delete the duplicate, record the fold in the cycle's report). If the tree does not exist, bootstrap it per the layout reference — directory tree, seeded templates/, and the gitignore block. If legacy QA artifacts sit scattered outside it, adopt them per the reference: index them, migrate durable knowledge, re-mint counter-based ids.

Step 2 — Establish project personas. Read references/personas.md (seed catalog + derivation rules). Personas are durable instance data in <qa-docs-path>/personas.md: update them only when the product's audience changed; if absent, derive 3-6 from the seed catalog, adapted to the product's real audience.