Compliance concepts

Check the work against its own constraints

In this context, compliance means assessing whether engineering work follows its stated objective, scope and required evidence. It does not mean a regulatory certification or a guarantee that a product satisfies an external standard.

Three questions for a review

• Did the work stay within the responsibility it was given?

• Does the result preserve the constraints that mattered to the task?

• Does the evidence describe the actual result and relevant source state?

For a payment-adapter change, a successful build alone does not establish preserved decline behavior. The review needs evidence for that behavior and an explanation of any remaining uncertainty. Similarly, a test result does not justify edits outside the unit’s agreed responsibility.

Distinguish a warning from a decision

An incomplete observation can identify a risk without deciding the final outcome. A reviewer may need another test, a narrower change or clarification of an ambiguous requirement. The intended Governance workflow keeps those decisions understandable instead of flattening every state into a success indicator.