Methodology
How a verdict gets earned
Every report follows the same evidence-based workflow, is evaluated against the same scorecard, and moves through the same public lifecycle.
Validation workflow
- 01Technology proposal intake
- 02Scope and fit decision
- 03Production question definition
- 04Sandbox and evidence-plan design
- 05Test execution and evidence collection
- 06Draft report development
- 07Independent review-panel review
- 08Publication decision
- 09Scheduled re-review
Scorecard dimensions
Problem Fit
Does the technology solve a real, bounded production problem?
Architecture Fit
Does it fit common production architectures without excessive rework?
Security
Authentication, authorization, secrets handling, supply-chain, and threat-surface concerns.
Reliability
Failure handling, retries, degradation behavior, and operational resilience.
Scalability
Behavior under load, multi-tenant pressure, and growth expectations.
Observability
Logs, metrics, traces, and incident-debuggability expectations.
Operations
Deployment, upgrade, rollback, and day-2 operational burden.
Community Health
Maintainer activity, bus factor, release discipline, and governance signals.
Compliance Considerations
Licensing and regulatory-adjacent constraints that operators should understand.
Cost and Complexity
Total operational cost and complexity relative to the problem solved.
Verdict model
NOT YET EVALUATED
The work is proposed, in progress, or under review. No verdict has been earned yet.
PRODUCTION READY
Evidence supports production use for the evaluated use cases without unusual guardrails.
PRODUCTION READY WITH GUARDRAILS
Production use is viable, but only with explicit controls, limits, or operating conditions.
GOOD FOR INTERNAL TOOLS
Suitable for internal or lower-stakes use, but not yet justified for broader production exposure.
SANDBOX ONLY
Useful for exploration or controlled testing, but not ready for production use.
AVOID FOR NOW
Known unresolved risks or gaps make production use inadvisable at this time.