Turn checkable process conditions into controls that cannot be talked around.
Some process expectations require judgment. Others are objective — and those do not need to depend on an agent interpreting natural-language guidance correctly.
If the evidence is objective, the check should be too.
Tests must pass. A required artifact must exist. Traceability must be updated. A review must be complete. A mandatory approval must be present. Conditions like these have unambiguous evidence, and a control can verify them without interpretation.
Use deterministic verification wherever objective process evidence exists, while reserving judgment-based decisions for people or appropriate review.
Conditions with unambiguous evidence.
- Required tests passed
- Required artifacts exist
- Traceability links present
- Mandatory fields complete
- Required review recorded
- Quality gate satisfied
- Definition-of-Done criteria complete
- Required approval present
- Prohibited action blocked
Five steps from objective conditions to tested gates.
Identify objective conditions
Review the effective process and determine which expectations have unambiguous machine-checkable evidence.
Define the evidence source
Identify where the relevant evidence can be obtained.
Define the control behavior
For each condition, determine whether failure should warn, request remediation, prevent progression, trigger human review, or stop execution.
Implement hooks and gates
Connect the checks to the workflow and relevant engineering systems.
Test failure behavior
Verify not only the successful path but what happens when evidence is missing, inconsistent, or unavailable.
- Evidence missing
- Evidence inconsistent
- Evidence unavailable
- Control itself unavailable
- Control inventory
- Checkability classification
- Evidence-source mappings
- Deterministic hooks
- Workflow gates
- Exception handling
- Test evidence
- Operating documentation
- Stop objective conditions depending on an agent reading guidance correctly.
- Make failure behavior an explicit design decision.
- Reserve human attention for the judgment calls.
- Test the paths that matter when something is missing.
Supplies the completion conditions and says which of them are machine-checkable.
Supplies the hook points the controls attach to.