Change Validation

Validate reasoning changes against the evidence chain, not answer plausibility. A convincing sentence can still come from the wrong bytes, an invalid support edge, an incomplete trace, or a replay that quietly consulted live state.

flowchart TD
    C[Changed reasoning behavior] --> Q{Which evidence link moved?}
    Q --> P[Specification or plan]
    Q --> E[Evidence or support]
    Q --> T[Trace or bundle]
    Q --> V[Verification or replay]
    P --> I[Canonical identity and dependency tests]
    E --> S[Span, digest, and tamper tests]
    T --> B[Ordering, manifest, and round-trip tests]
    V --> R[Positive, negative, frozen, and diff tests]

Risk-to-evidence matrix

Risk	Required focused evidence
specification meaning changes without identity change	canonical-form and content-ID canary
plan order becomes ambiguous	dependency, cycle, stable-order, and serialization tests
evidence is cited by label only	retained bytes, exact span, snippet digest, and target-ID assertions
support survives source tampering	changed-byte and out-of-range-span rejection tests
claim status implies unsupported truth	independent kind, status, confidence, and support fixtures
trace omits causal events	start/finish, call/return, evidence, claim, failure, and order assertions
verifier accepts malformed bundles	missing, duplicate, digest-mismatch, unsafe-path, and schema tests
standalone verify overwrites run evidence	original-report preservation and distinct output-path test
replay invokes live state	frozen-tool and pinned-retrieval tests with live access disabled
replay equality ignores semantic change	checksum, fingerprint, policy, corpus, and structured-diff tests

Select the narrowest useful command

packages/bijux-canon-reason/.venv/bin/python -m pytest \
  packages/bijux-canon-reason/tests/<area>/<test-file>.py -q

make test PACKAGE=bijux-canon-reason

Add only the boundary lanes implicated by the change:

make api PACKAGE=bijux-canon-reason
make lint PACKAGE=bijux-canon-reason
make quality PACKAGE=bijux-canon-reason
make build PACKAGE=bijux-canon-reason
make docs-check

Validate claims by failure as well as success

Every new verifier or support rule needs a fixture that passes and a fixture that fails for the intended invariant. Assert the stable finding identifier, severity, target, and retained details—not only the report's aggregate Boolean.

For replay, disconnect live tools and make recorded inputs the only available path. A new live run with the same answer is not replay evidence. For manifest work, verify the file digests directly because trace equality and whole-bundle integrity cover different surfaces.

Update artifact, limitation, and release documentation when any retained file, identity input, verification meaning, or replay precondition changes.

Validation is sufficient when a reviewer can tamper with the relevant link, observe an exact governed failure, and reproduce the positive result from the retained bundle alone.