Certified Candidate

Definition

A certified candidate is a release candidate that has completed Yanzi’s governance certification process. To reach certified status, a release candidate must:

1. Have a complete, verifiable operational lineage
2. Pass convergence validation — its implementation converges to governed intent
3. Meet all active Rules and Role authority constraints
4. Receive explicit human approval at each governance gate

A certified candidate has promotable lineage — it is eligible for release promotion. Certification does not promote the release; it establishes that promotion is authorised.

Why It Matters

The certification process answers a question that traditional CI/CD pipelines do not: did this release follow the governed operational context that was established for it?

Build pipelines verify that software compiles, tests pass, and deployment scripts succeed. These are implementation checks. Certification is an operational check — it verifies that the implementation aligns with the governed decisions, constraints, and approvals that governed its development.

The Certification Process

Certification in Yanzi produces a human-readable trace document that includes:

• The corpus hash at the time of certification
• The list of artifacts and checkpoints reviewed
• Convergence validation results
• Each governance gate and its approval status

This trace document is stored as an append-only artifact in the corpus, giving every certified candidate a permanent, auditable certification record.

In Yanzi

The v2.9.1 release was the first to complete a full certification cycle. Its certification trace is available as a reference implementation of the governance process.