CAR-0365: Management.Core remained a cross-family application catch-all

Status

Prevented — 2026-09-14

References

• Issue: #365
• Introducing change: Unknown; the catch-all accumulated across historical Management-plane implementations
• Corrective pull request: #364
• Related ADRs: ADR-0109

Defect

Agentstration.Management.Core owned application behavior for unrelated Identity, Extensions/AEP, Models, Runtime Profiles, Packs, Sources, and resource-scope capabilities. API, Infrastructure, Runtime, Web, and test projects depended directly on this shared implementation hub, even though those capabilities have separate lifecycles and accepted resource-family owners.

The project made the architectural Control Plane umbrella appear to be one business domain. It also allowed new behavior to accumulate in a central assembly and obscured the dependency direction between resource families.

Detection

• Stage: Code review
• Detection mechanism: inventory of the projects and types remaining under the Management prefix while decomposing the control plane for #362
• Why it was not detected earlier: earlier architecture treated Management as both a plane and an implementation module, and no repository guard required family behavior to leave the aggregate project

Causal analysis

Faulty approach

Independent resource-family use cases were added to a shared Management application project because they all participated in control-plane administration. Architectural-plane membership was used as a substitute for domain ownership, producing a broad dependency hub.

Contributing assumptions

• All declarative or administrable resources were assumed to belong to one Management application module.
• Moving contracts or endpoints was assumed to provide sufficient modularity while application services remained centralized.
• A shared implementation project was assumed to simplify composition without materially coupling resource families.

Missed signals

• The project contained unrelated services for identity, extensions, models, runtime profiles, packs, and sources.
• Host and adapter projects referenced the aggregate implementation instead of narrow family modules.
• Test ownership retained historical Management names even when tests exercised one family.
• ADR-0109's distinction between the Control Plane umbrella and resource-family owners required the aggregate project to disappear.

Safeguard gap

Architecture tests restricted some downstream dependencies but did not assert that Agentstration.Management.Core was absent. The build and solution inventories could therefore remain green while the catch-all project survived.

Resolution

Commit e4b03bd in PR #364 moves application services to explicit Identity, Extensions, Extensions.Aep, Models.Application, Runtime.Profiles, Packs, Sources, and Tools owners. Composition references those modules directly, test ownership and solution inventories are realigned, and src/Agentstration.Management.Core is deleted without introducing a replacement ControlPlane.Core catch-all.

Prevention

Architecture tests now assert that the Agentstration.Management.Core directory is absent and that no project references the removed assembly. Family application modules are checked against host, concrete storage, Entity Framework, Agent Framework, and other forbidden implementation dependencies. ADR-0109 and repository instructions explicitly reserve Control Plane for the architectural umbrella and prohibit another global business aggregator.

Validation

• Release build: succeeded with 0 warnings and 0 errors
• Architecture tests: 56/56 passed
• Functional validation: 855 executed, 852 passed, 3 optional external-service tests skipped, 0 failed
• Test assemblies were executed directly through generated MSTest executables because the validation environment did not support the usual .NET 10 socket-IPC path used by dotnet test
• Repository inspection confirmed deletion of src/Agentstration.Management.Core and absence of project references to the removed assembly