13. Conformance
13.1 Claiming Conformance
An organization claiming conformance to SENAR SHALL:
a) Identify the applicable configuration: Foundation, Team, or Enterprise (Section 11); b) Implement all SHALL requirements of the applicable configuration; c) Document any SHOULD requirements that are not implemented, with rationale; d) Maintain evidence of implementation (audit records, metric data, task tracker records).
A conformance claim SHALL use the following format: “[Organization] conforms to SENAR v[version] [Configuration] configuration, [self-declared | peer-assessed | independently audited], as of [date].“
13.2 Conformance Levels
| Level | Description | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Self-declared | Organization assesses itself against SENAR requirements | Internal assessment record |
| Peer-assessed | Assessment conducted by a SENAR practitioner from another organization | Peer assessment report |
| Independently audited | Assessment by a qualified auditor with SE process assessment experience | Formal audit report |
Organizations MAY claim any conformance level. Higher levels provide stronger evidence for stakeholders, clients, and regulators.
13.3 SENAR Core
Teams implementing SENAR Core are not required to conform to this Standard but are encouraged to adopt Foundation configuration when ready. SENAR Core conformance is declared separately per the SENAR Core document.
This governs how every Core column in this Standard is to be read, and it is stated here and nowhere else. Those columns are informative. This Standard’s obligations begin at Foundation (11.4). Where a Core column states a level — as the gate property scale in 8.6 does — it states what the level would be at that scale, so that the Foundation row can be read as a step up from something. It is not a requirement on anyone, and no conformance claim is assessed against it. What Core requires of a gate is in the SENAR Core document, in Core’s own register and without this Standard’s machinery — see Three things that make a gate a gate there, which carries (a), (c) and (e), the three that work with a text editor: a document of eight rules that acquired a Gate Bypass procedure would no longer be the thing its adopters chose. Sections that carry a Core column carry a pointer to this subsection instead of restating the argument.
13.4 Partial Conformance
Organizations MAY claim partial conformance by specifying which sections they conform to (e.g., “SENAR Team conformant for Sections 6, 8, 9 and 10”). Partial conformance claims SHALL explicitly list the included sections, and the list SHALL accompany the claim wherever the claim is published. A claim stated in the format of 13.1 without its list of sections is a claim of full conformance to the named configuration, whatever the internal assessment record says.
Partial conformance claims SHALL include at minimum Sections 6 (Units of Work), 8 (Quality Gates), 9 (Metrics), and 10 (Operational Rules) — these constitute the irreducible core of SENAR practice. A claim covering only definitional sections (Sections 1–4) is not a valid partial conformance claim.
A partial conformance claim that includes Section 8 SHALL include Section 8.6 in its entirety. The gate properties are not divisible: where a property is required at the claimed configuration and is absent, the result is not a partially conforming gate but a check that does not meet the definition of one (8.6). Claiming the criteria of 8.1–8.5 while omitting 8.6 claims the form of the gates without the substance.
13.5 Non-Conformance Handling
When a SHALL requirement cannot be met, the organization SHALL document the non-conformance with: justification, risk acknowledgment, remediation plan, and approval by a role senior to the requestor. Non-conformance records are distinct from operational Gate Bypasses (Section 3.13) — they apply at the process level, not the task level.
13.6 Maintaining Conformance
Organizations claiming conformance SHOULD reassess at each Increment Retrospective (Section 7.7). Where that ceremony is not conducted — Foundation omits it (11.1) — organizations SHOULD reassess at each Quality Sweep (7.4) instead, and it is that interval 8.6(g) reads as the floor for retaining records. Conformance claims SHOULD be re-evaluated after: major process changes, AI model generation changes (Section 10.13), or organizational scaling across configuration tiers.
Reassessment required by revision 1.4
A conformance claim made against a revision earlier than 1.4 was not assessed against Section 8.6, because those properties did not exist then. Organizations holding a Team or Enterprise claim SHALL reassess against 8.6(b) in particular. A gate placed after the effect it declares — at review, at merge, or at any point where the effect has already occurred — is a detective control and does not satisfy 8.6(b), which is SHALL from Team.
Some claims that were valid under earlier revisions are not valid under this one. This is a consequence of stating the requirement, not of raising it: before 8.6, placement was not specified, so a claim could be made without the question being asked. Reassessment is required, not optional. Where the requirement cannot be met, 13.5 applies — the non-conformance is documented with justification, risk acknowledgment, remediation plan, and senior approval, and the claim is corrected rather than maintained. The configuration notation of Section 3, corrected in the same revision, calls for no reassessment: the key was restored to the meaning every use of it in Sections 4–13 already carried, so no requirement changed level.
13.7 Mechanically Checkable Clauses
Conformance to most of this standard is assessed by reading: process descriptions, records, and statements about what an organization does. The gate properties of Section 8.6 are stated here in the form an assessor can check against evidence rather than against a description. They are not the only requirements in this standard with that character — 8.2 (orphaned requirements), 10.10 (traceability), 10.13 (model identifier per Session), 10.15(c) (recorded findings) and 6.2 (Task attributes) are all decidable from tracker and version-control data — but they are the ones whose evidence this section specifies. They are listed so that a claimant knows what to retain and an assessor knows what to ask for.
What follows is checkable only to the extent that the records required by 8.6(g) exist, are complete, and have been retained. Those obligations are stated there, not here, and an assessor whose claimant cannot produce them has not found a passing gate; they have found an unassessable claim.
| Property | What is presented | How it is checked |
|---|---|---|
| a) Declared prevented effect | The gate’s definition, naming the effect | The declaration exists, and a specific proposed action can be tested against it |
| b) Preventive placement | Audit records (8.6(g)) for the gate and for the declared effect | The verdict is recorded before the effect, not after |
| c) Correspondence of the verdict to state | The audit record identifying the state the verdict was issued for | No verdict is applied to a state other than the one it names |
| d) Binding to a measured digest | The recorded digest and the artifacts it names | The digest recomputed over those artifacts equals the recorded value |
| e) Fail-closed | Records of runs that reached no verdict, and the checks the gate depended on with the result of each (8.6(g)) | No positive verdict was recorded or relied upon in any such case; no verdict is positive while a check it depended on produced no result; and where the gate is preventively placed, the declared effect was prevented |
These differ in how mechanical they are, and the difference is not concealed: (d) is recomputable by an assessor holding the artifacts and the record of the set the digest covers; (b), (c) and (e) are decidable from the records 8.6(g) requires — of the gate execution and of the admission of the effect — and from nothing else; (a) is a presence check followed by the applicability test stated in 8.6(a), which needs a reader.
Two limits belong here rather than in a reader’s discovery. First, (d) establishes that a recorded digest and a set of artifacts correspond; both are produced by the claimant, so the recomputation demonstrates internal consistency and not the moment of recording. Second, and stated in 8.3 for the gate itself: none of these checks is an attestation against a participant who intends to mislead. They are controls against evidence drifting from what it describes. An assessor seeking assurance against a purposeful claimant should look to the conformance level (13.2) and to who produced the records, not to a further row in this table.
This adds nothing to Section 13.2. The three conformance levels are unchanged and no fourth level is introduced. What changes is that at any of those levels, part of the assessment can rest on evidence rather than on assertion.
NOTE: This standard defines no certification scheme, maintains no register of claimants, and requires no paid assessment. A conformance claim is made by the organization itself, per 13.1. Nothing in this section creates a body, and nothing in it makes an assessment by a third party a precondition for claiming conformance.