| name | verification-ladder |
| description | Use this skill when deciding how deeply to validate a change or when explaining confidence in a code change. Trigger for test planning, selecting the right validation rung, or classifying confidence as test-green, smoke-green, or watched-live-green. Do not use this skill for runtime root-cause investigation or Philotic slice close-out unless validation choice is the main task. |
| domain | runtime-sessions |
| sver | verification-ladder-proposal |
Verification Ladder
SVER Source: VERIFICATION_LADDER_PROPOSAL
Scope: General.
Use this skill when the main question is: how much validation is required, or what confidence level is honest?
This skill owns:
- selecting validation depth
- mapping change type to test/integration/smoke/watched-run expectations
- describing confidence honestly
This skill does not own:
- runtime root-cause debugging
- proposal hygiene
- slice commit/push closure
Use $runtime-debugger when the issue is a live runtime failure.
Use philotic-slice-closeout when the main job is closing a Philotic implementation slice.
SVER State Machine
Defined in VERIFICATION_LADDER_PROPOSAL:
PROPOSED → CODE-COMPLETE → TEST-GREEN → SMOKE-GREEN → UAT-GREEN → IMPLEMENTED
| State | Definition | Evidence Required |
|---|
| PROPOSED | Design approved, active seams defined | Proposal document |
| CODE-COMPLETE | Slice landed, all code committed | Git commits, PR merged |
| TEST-GREEN | Unit tests pass, coverage thresholds met | Test results, coverage report |
| SMOKE-GREEN | Integration verified, live validation passes | Smoke test logs |
| UAT-GREEN | Production validation complete | UAT sign-off |
| IMPLEMENTED | Architecture doc updated, full traceability | Graph shows complete chain |
Ladder (Validation Depth)
- Crate or unit tests
- Integration or e2e tests
- Binary smokes
- Watched live run
Decision Rules
Climb the ladder when the change affects IPC, networking, concurrency, supervision, routing, delivery, materialization, or environment-specific behavior.
Before claiming smoke-green or watched-live-green on an installed stack, confirm the installed runtime truth gate:
- the installed binary changed
- the supervised process restarted
- the running process is using the updated binary path
Otherwise the honest result remains test-green, no matter how persuasive the theory sounds.
Output Expectations
Report:
- which rungs were run
- what passed
- what remains unverified
- the highest honest confidence level
- current SVER state and evidence links
