Evidence Package Creator

Evidence Package Creator

Purpose

Create auditable evidence packages from tickets, pipeline results, test reports, approvals, scans, and architecture information. Treat regulatory, security, and operational references as review and evidence guidance, not legal advice.

When to use

• evidence packages decisions, controls, or operating practices need independent review.
• A change affects evidence packages artifacts such as ticket export, pipeline result, test report, approval, scan report, architecture reference.
• The user needs evidence-oriented findings for risks such as missing source link, unverifiable package, sensitive data exposure, incomplete scan context, unapproved change, timestamp mismatch.
• Audit, security, operations, or platform stakeholders need a concise readiness position.
• Existing documentation, tickets, tests, or logs must be turned into actionable remediation items.

Operating model

1. Identify the relevant evidence packages artifacts, owners, systems, environments, and review boundary.
2. Compare the available artifacts against expected signals such as package manifest, checksum, redaction note, reviewer sign-off, retention location, source URL.
3. Separate confirmed gaps from assumptions, missing evidence, and advisory improvement opportunities.
4. Rate findings by operational, security, compliance, customer, and auditability impact.
5. Recommend minimal remediation steps, validation evidence, owners, and review cadence.

Spec-Driven Change Context

• Treat repository specs, ADRs, runbooks, change proposals, design notes, and task files as durable context that outlives a chat session.
• For non-trivial changes, prefer a checked-in change artifact or equivalent proposal/design/tasks record before implementation begins.
• Capture requirement deltas explicitly: added, modified, removed, deprecated, or unchanged behavior.
• Keep implementation tasks traceable to acceptance criteria, affected specs, validation commands, and owners.
• During verification, compare the implementation against the proposal, design decisions, task checklist, and spec deltas.
• After completion, sync or archive completed change artifacts so the repository's source of truth reflects the final behavior.
• If the repository has no spec workflow yet, report the missing artifact and provide a minimal proposal/spec/tasks outline instead of relying on chat-only intent.

Skill-Specific Review Scope

• Primary artifacts: ticket export, pipeline result, test report, approval, scan report, architecture reference.
• Risk themes: missing source link, unverifiable package, sensitive data exposure, incomplete scan context, unapproved change, timestamp mismatch.
• Evidence signals: package manifest, checksum, redaction note, reviewer sign-off, retention location, source URL.
• Ownership, approvals, review cadence, exception handling, and residual-risk decisions.
• Traceability from requirement or control intent to implementation, validation, and retained evidence.

Skill-Specific Checklist

• Confirm the review boundary covers the right evidence packages systems, teams, and environments.
• Inventory and inspect the current ticket export.
• Check whether pipeline result is current, approved, versioned, and owned.
• Verify that test report has test, ticket, log, or approval support.
• Look for missing source link and record concrete repository or process evidence.
• Look for unverifiable package and identify affected assets, services, or stakeholders.
• Look for sensitive data exposure and classify the operational or audit impact.
• Use package manifest to validate that the control or practice is operating.
• Use checksum to confirm ownership, timing, and reproducibility.
• Check exception, risk-acceptance, and expiry handling for evidence packages.
• Confirm remediation items have owners, due dates, validation steps, and evidence expectations.
• Identify missing artifacts separately from weak artifacts so the next action is unambiguous.
• Review whether logging, reporting, or retained evidence exposes sensitive data unnecessarily.

Decision Rules

• If ticket export is missing for a critical service, raise at least a high-severity readiness gap.
• If checksum cannot be tied to an owner and approval, treat the outcome as unauditable until corrected.
• If approval is present but expired or untested, require validation before accepting residual risk.
• If the only support is verbal or chat-only context, request durable ticket, document, log, or test evidence.
• If remediation would require a process or architecture decision, assign a decision owner instead of prescribing legal conclusions.
• If compensating measures reduce likelihood but not impact, keep the residual-risk statement explicit.

Finding Categories

• Missing or stale evidence packages artifact.
• Unclear ownership, approval, review cadence, or accountability.
• Insufficient validation, test proof, logs, ticket trail, or retained audit material.
• Unreviewed exception, residual risk, expiry, or compensating measure.
• Policy, architecture, operational, or platform implementation drift.
• Sensitive-data exposure in logs, reports, prompts, artifacts, or evidence packages.

Severity Guidance

• Critical: a gap in evidence packages creates immediate outage, data-loss, privilege, regulatory-reporting, or irreversible business risk.
• High: ticket export is missing, unowned, untested, or unauditable for a critical service or material change.
• Medium: pipeline result exists but is stale, incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or weakly evidenced.
• Low: wording, metadata, formatting, link freshness, or minor traceability improvements are needed.

DevSecOps Guardrails

• Do not read secrets, .env files, private keys, production credentials, masked CI/CD variables, database dumps, or sensitive logs unless explicitly required.
• Do not push, deploy, publish, merge, or create releases unless explicitly asked.
• Prefer merge requests, reviewable diffs, and auditable validation evidence.
• Prefer least privilege, minimal changes, and explicit rollback notes.
• Do not fabricate test results, repository state, commands, security findings, or validation outcomes.
• Report assumptions, uncertainty, residual risk, and validation gaps clearly.

Output Requirements

• Findings ordered by severity with affected evidence packages artifacts and evidence references.
• Coverage note for reviewed artifacts: ticket export, pipeline result, test report, approval, scan report, architecture reference.
• Risk note covering relevant themes: missing source link, unverifiable package, sensitive data exposure, incomplete scan context, unapproved change, timestamp mismatch.
• Evidence request list using expected signals: package manifest, checksum, redaction note, reviewer sign-off, retention location, source URL.
• Deliverables or updates needed: evidence package manifest, collection checklist, redaction summary, gap list, auditor handoff notes.
• Residual-risk, assumptions, missing-context, and validation-gap summary.

Acceptance Criteria

• Relevant evidence packages artifacts are identified, current, owned, and versioned where applicable.
• Each high-impact finding includes evidence, impact, likelihood, owner, and remediation guidance.
• Missing evidence is separated from failed controls or weak implementation.
• Exceptions and risk acceptances include owner, rationale, expiry, and compensating measures.
• Recommendations are review-oriented and avoid presenting regulatory interpretation as legal advice.
• Final output states pass, conditional pass, or blocked readiness with validation gaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating a policy title or control name as proof that the practice operates effectively.
• Collapsing missing evidence and failed implementation into one vague finding.
• Accepting open-ended exceptions without owner, expiry, impact, likelihood, and compensating measures.
• Making legal, regulatory, or audit conclusions beyond the available evidence and review scope.
• Recommending broad process rewrites when a targeted owner, test, ticket, or evidence fix is enough.
• Copying sensitive production data into examples, evidence packages, prompts, or reports.

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2026-07-28

• Initial generated production-ready SDLC / DevSecOps skill.