Skip to content

adr-rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation

Decision

Institutionalise Rule-Grounded Compliance Evaluation as a core global architectural pattern, evaluating codebase deltas against deterministic rule specifications rather than subjective LLM judgements.

Context

  • Source: governance-flow
  • Pattern: rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation
  • Promotion Recommendation: recommendation-rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation
  • Scope Classification: global
  • Scope Classification Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Autonomous and continuous architecture workflows require objective, machine-auditable verification of codebase deltas. Purely static linting lacks architectural intent awareness, while unconstrained LLM assessments suffer from hallucinations, non-determinism, and subjective drift. Codifying deterministic rules into ComplianceEngine provides repeatable, verifiable evaluation results across pipelines.

Scope

Applicability: All continuous delivery pipelines, pre-merge gate validations, and repository governance verification flows across organization workspaces.

Global organizational standard for continuous architectural compliance scanning and finding aggregation.

Consequences

Governance

Establishes deterministic compliance scoring and machine-readable findings as the authoritative gate for architecture evolution, removing ambiguity from promotion and review lifecycles.

Execution

Decouples delta analysis from subjective manual checks, executing rule validation within automated CI workflows and populating structured compliance metrics with zero LLM API dependency.

System Behaviour

Repository state mutations and candidate architectural changes produce repeatable pass/fail findings with explicit diagnostic reasons, preventing unauthorized deviations from organizational standards.

Evidence Summary

Promotion Evidence

Validated in src/cas_runner/governance/compliance_engine.py and verified across continuous architecture pipelines (cas-build-validation.yml, cas-continuous-architecture.yml) with production usage support.

Promotion Criteria

Satisfied all primary promotion criteria: significance, reusability, recurrence, evidence quality, governance maturity, and strategic alignment.

Governance Risks

Risk of rule inflation over time resulting in high maintenance overhead or contradictory compliance constraints, requiring periodic rule consolidation reviews.

Traceability

Pattern Proposal

rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation

Scope Classification

Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Classification: global

Promotion Recommendation

recommendation-rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation

Promotion Decision

promotion-decision-rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation

Next Step

  • Submit ADR to Architecture Forum for formal institutionalisation
  • Generate global pattern record in knowledge/global/patterns/rule-grounded-compliance-evaluation.md