Summary

The specification standards added in DRIVERS-3667 include these requirements:

• Deprecated features MUST be marked as deprecated and removed entirely from the specification once no driver and server pair supports them.
• Unified tests not run by any driver MUST be deleted.
• Prose tests not run by any driver MUST have their contents replaced with `Removed`.
• Authors MUST NOT remove the test's number.

Nowhere do we define the process or timeline for deprecating and removing specification content or tests. We need to clearly define our policy for doing so.

Motivation

Who is the affected end user?

Who are the stakeholders?

Driver maintainers.

How does this affect the end user?

Are they blocked? Are they annoyed? Are they confused?

Inconsistency and confusion over what different phases of deprecation and removal mean and when they occur.

How likely is it that this problem or use case will occur?

Main path? Edge case?

Every time we deprecate or remove a specification test or content.

If the problem does occur, what are the consequences and how severe are they?

Minor annoyance at a log message? Performance concern? Outage/unavailability? Failover can't complete?

Inconsistency across drivers.

Is this issue urgent?

Does this ticket have a required timeline? What is it?

No.

Is this ticket required by a downstream team?

Needed by e.g. Atlas, Shell, Compass?

No.

Is this ticket only for tests?

Does this ticket have any functional impact, or is it just test improvements?

Policy and process improvements only.

Acceptance Criteria

What specific requirements must be met to consider the design phase complete?

• Define clearly what "deprecation" means for specifications.
• Define clear timelines for complete removal of specification content or tests.
• Define what versioning drivers must use when deprecating or removing features due to specification changes. Patch, minor, or major?
• This should be a WRITING ticket with a doc that is LGTMed by leadership that is later published to the wiki as an official drivers policy