Versioning and Governance
Versioning and governance answer: "How can clients safely keep using an agent system while metadata, schemas, tools, policies, and protocols evolve?"
Agentic systems have multiple contracts. A production change may touch an Agent Card, OpenAPI contract, MCP tool schema, A2A behavior, memory configuration, model route, policy rule, or evaluation suite.
Governance Rules
- Version machine-readable metadata that clients depend on.
- Preserve operation IDs and tool names unless intentionally versioned.
- Treat Agent Card changes as discovery changes, not just documentation edits.
- Reject stale metadata when the version affects safety or compatibility.
- Keep evaluation scenarios aligned with protocol and policy changes.
- Record governance decisions in registry metadata or a policy system.
Demo Mapping
The demo rejects stale A2A requests when the supplied Agent Card version does not match the expected version. Registry metadata records the currently approved Agent Card version.