Core concepts
OIS describes software delivery with six record types, one embedded type and one transport
container. All records are JSON and share the fields ois, type, id and createdAt. The
normative definitions are in section 4 of the specification.
Records
Section titled “Records”| Record | States | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Intent | What a change must achieve, with acceptance criteria. Versioned; immutable once approved. | “Customers change their address in the portal”, criterion AC-2 in EARS |
| Artifact | Something produced: code, a test, a contract, a dataset, a document or a build. Referenced by location and digest, never stored. | The test file tests/address.spec.ts at a commit |
| Actor | A human, an AI agent or a tool. Agents name their model. | A QE agent on model B, version 2.1 |
| Evidence | That one test run produced one result for one criterion, and whether the test was derived from the intent, the implementation or neither. | AC-2 passed, derived from the intent |
| Decision | The outcome of a gate, bound to the content it was made on. | The product owner approves an intent version, bound to its digest |
| Finding | A defect or incident; resolved only by an independent decision. | A postcode case nobody required breaks the premium calculation |
A bundle carries several records together. A Quality Passport is an in-toto attestation that collects every record behind a release.
References and integrity rules
Section titled “References and integrity rules”Records point to each other by URI: an evidence record names a criterion as
<intent-id>@<version>#<key>, its test and the code under test. Because every artifact names
its producer and what the producer was given (context), a validator can check claims that would
otherwise rest on trust, for example:
- R4, derivation: a test that claims to be derived from the intent saw the criterion and no code.
- R5, independence: a test derived from the intent was not written by the actor that wrote the code.
- R1, approval: an approved intent is bound to its approval by a digest, so an edit after approval is detectable.
All rules are in section 5.
Versions and history
Section titled “Versions and history”Nothing is deleted. An approved intent changes only by a new version; evidence for an older version counts for a newer one only if the criterion is unchanged, which a digest shows (section 6.3). Wrong evidence is revoked by a decision, and findings are superseded by new records.
Conformance levels
Section titled “Conformance levels”| Level | Name | What a producer does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Observe | Emits artifact and evidence records for its own outputs. derivedFrom may be unknown. |
| 2 | Intent-aware | Reads intents, references criteria and records the complete context of what it produces. |
| 3 | Attested | Carries an identity and signs the bundles and passports it emits. |
A validator checks records against the schema and the integrity rules and reports each problem as a violation, warning or info, with its rule. The conformance test suite defines what it must report.