A handoff condition is the answer to one question: what must be true after this step before the next step begins? Three properties make a handoff condition load-bearing.

W. Edwards Deming (1900, 1993) , American statistician whose Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, articulated across Out of the Crisis (1986) and his decades of work with Japanese manufacturers, made the case that quality is built into a process through explicit verification at every step, not inspected in at the end. Deming's argument, against the dominant practice of his era, was that final inspection was the most expensive place to catch failure.