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Tenka Advanced Topics

Tenka Inheritance

Tenka (User Stories and Acceptance Criteria) supports scope inheritance with selective override semantics.

  • Additive User Stories: Stories defined in parent scopes are inherited by children. If a child defines a story with a new ID, it is added to the vision.
  • User Story Overrides: If a child defines a story with the same ID as a parent:
    • Top-level fields (who, what, why, active) are replaced by the child's values.
    • Acceptance Criteria (AC) Merging: ACs are merged selectively. A child AC overrides a parent AC with the same ID. Parent ACs not redefined in the child are retained.
  • History Inheritance: Requirement change history entries are inherited and merged from parent scopes. Entries are deduplicated by (timestamp, reason), ensuring a complete and unified audit trail across the entire scope hierarchy.

This allows a parent scope to define a high-level requirement while a project-specific child scope refines the specific criteria for fulfilling it.