Metra Praxis
From Domain Expertise to a Defined System.
Metra Praxis is the design and discovery method behind every edition of Standard. It starts with the people who know the work, writes the whole system down before anything is built, puts the picture in front of the experts for review, and delivers a bounded first release that is verified against the work itself.
The method
Five Steps, in Order.
Learning and research overlap; everything else runs in sequence.
Learn the Work
The people who do the work describe it in their own words: the roles, the records, the workflows, the standards that bind them, and the numbers that matter. The operator writes it down exactly and never proposes a solution during this stage.
Define the System
The whole system on ten pages: every record as a subject with its lifecycle, the spine record that cannot be wrong, who sees what, the standards mapped to the records that prove them, the integrations, the volumes.
Review with Domain Experts
The picture is read against the interviews and the research, section by section. A section that does not hold sends the operator back to the expert with a specific question, not to their own judgment.
Deliver a Bounded First Release
A first product on one page, with a bounded scope and an acceptance audit written before the building starts. What ships first, and how everyone will know it worked.
Verify It Against the Work
Evidence from working software, checked by people who did not write it, against the records the experts said mattered. What is proven is recorded with how it was observed.
Three seats
Who Holds What.
The seats are named so that knowing, writing and deciding stay distinct acts.
Five artifacts
What Discovery Produces.
Each artifact is a file with a named owner. Discovery is over when the fifth is ratified.
The spine test
Find the Record That Cannot Be Wrong.
Every domain has one or two records where being wrong is catastrophic rather than inconvenient.
The interviews ask, for every record, what the worst thing is that happens if it is wrong, missing, or altered, answered in consequences rather than adjectives. The record with the worst answer is the spine, and the whole system is designed outward from it: what must be append-only, what must be signed, what must be numbered, what must be verifiable from outside, and what the audit trail must prove. In a calibration business it is the certificate. Everything else in the system can be ordinary. The spine cannot.
Discipline
Timeboxed, Sourced, Reviewed.
The method carries its own limits so that a project's shape is a decision, not a drift.
Read it
The Discovery Document.
The method, as written, with its worksheets and its stages.
The Discovery phase is published in full in the library, with the intake questionnaire, the eight interview worksheets, the research checklist, the system picture template, and the foundation questions.
Talk Through Fit.
If your industry has records that cannot be wrong and software that treats them as ordinary, we would like to hear how the work actually goes.