The Verification Spine is a first-class governance subsystem of ShieldCraft Engine.
Purpose:
- Goal: Ensure outputs from the ShieldCraft pipeline meet structural, semantic, and determinism guarantees required for decision-grade artifacts.
- Scope: Specification validation, checklist verification, determinism snapshots, readiness evaluation, and artifact-level parity checks.
Responsibilities:
- Define blocking and advisory verification gates.
- Emit deterministic snapshots and canonical digests for regression tests.
- Provide audit-friendly artifacts for external validation (summary.json, manifest.json, canonical_preview.json).
Artifacts:
summary.json: run-level metrics and determinism flag.canonical_preview.json: canonicalized preview payload used for byte-level determinism checks.generated_checklist.json: checklist items used for verification and test generation.persona_events_v1.json: persona event traces when persona is enabled.
Decision points and owners:
- Verification Owner:
verification@shieldcraft(team-level owner responsible for policy and CI gating). - Determinism Policy: Engine and spec maintainers. Determinism violations are treated as CI-blocking regressions unless an allowlist is in place.
Enforcement:
- Verification is applied at preflight and self-host stages. Blocking invariants are enforced only when configured via TAC or authoritative spec flags.
See also: docs/governance/CONTRACTS.md, docs/persona/PERSONA_PROTOCOL.md, and spec/se_dsl_v1.spec.json for concrete contracts.