Evidence Reconciliation

Evidence reconciliation is the last step of a climb: check a finished result against the claim’s named test, then write the outcome into every record that owns a piece of it. There are usually three: the claim’s own status, where the product truth lives; the operational record of ownership and gates, if the run has one; and the evidence record, where the observation itself is kept. Each answers a different question, and one record answering two of them is how the two answers start to disagree.

Evidence is an observation bound to a snapshot: a test that passed at an exact commit, recorded together with that commit. Without the binding the result cannot be reproduced, and a claim marked true on it is a claim nobody can re-check. Finishing and being trusted are therefore different states: work that is built and reviewed but not yet reconciled is a candidate, and in a parallel run a finished lane stays a candidate until a combined pass tests the lanes together. Closing a ticket is not evidence that anything holds.

Verified progress can fall. A review finding that checks out can reopen a closed claim, and the count of what is proved drops even though the work went forward: the count was wrong before the finding and is right after it. That is why the record of what is true and the record of what is being worked on stay separate, and why a dashboard or report built on them is a view of the truth, never the place it is kept.