locale qa agent signed off with missing plural forms and the release failed

Fix the locale QA agent signing off with missing plural forms

TL;DR

The agent's checklist does not cover plurals, so add a plural-completeness gate before sign-off. Missing plural forms slip through because nobody renders every count. For each locale, enumerate the plural categories it needs and assert the catalog has them all, then sign off.

The error

Locale QA agent: signed off, release failed on missing Arabic few form
ar catalog lacked items_few, nobody checked

Fix it

Step 1: Compute the required categories per locale

node -e "for(const l of ['ar','fr','ja']) console.log(l, 'needs check via Intl.PluralRules categories')"

Expected: You know the expected set per locale.

Step 2: Assert catalog completeness

node -e "console.log('pattern: for each plural key base and locale, assert every required suffix exists in the catalog')"

Expected: Gaps become failures before sign-off.

Step 3: Add the gate to the sign-off flow

grep -n "signoff\|approve" scripts/qa-agent.js | head -5

Expected: You find where to hook the check.

Step 4: Re-run sign-off on the current catalogs

node scripts/qa-agent.js --signoff | tail -3

Expected: Missing forms block sign-off until fixed.

When to use this

• A QA agent signs off with plural forms missing
• Releases fail on absent plural keys

When NOT to use this

• The forms exist but are wrong, that is a copy issue
• The release failed for other reasons, check those

Tool and version compatibility

• Intl.PluralRules category sets per locale
• Catalog completeness checks

Variant phrasings

ordinals missing too

Same gate with ordinal rules. Ordinals are a separate category set.

only some keys are pluralized

The gate should know which keys are plural. Mark them or detect the suffix pattern.

Why it happens

QA checklists verify what is present, and missing keys are invisible to presence checks. Without an explicit completeness assertion against the locale's required categories, gaps ship silently.

Edge cases

• New locales need their category set added to the gate config
• The gate must run after the final catalog build, not before
• Report the exact missing suffixes, key_base plus locale plus suffix

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_kb3GHqA9NewjYciMApFTSg