Product
Conformance
Evidence, verification, and certification—the proof layer that turns deterministic runs into PASS or actionable failure.
What it is
Conformance covers verify (artifact and digest checks), test (mandatory suites), and certify (profile-bound certification). Certification is the outcome of that pipeline—not a separate product.
Why it exists
Without evidence, “it worked on my machine” is not an engineering claim. Conformance binds profiles, fixtures, and digests so teams can trust results across machines and CI.
When to use it
- After every meaningful change to docs, plugins, or execution inputs
- In CI as the merge gate for documentation systems
- When onboarding—First PASS is a conformance success
How it works
Deterministic execution produces evidence. verify validates structure and digests. certify evaluates a target against a profile and emits a certification level (for example PASS).
pnpm exec cellas verify pnpm exec cellas certify # Expected: verify → SUCCESS, certify → PASS
Certification
A PASS certification means mandatory suites for the selected profile succeeded and a certificate record was produced. Historical evidence under samples/reference-execution-001/ remains immutable; local runs never rewrite it.
Relationship to other components
- Runtime and Engine produce the artifacts under test
- CLI is the operator interface
- Plugin SDK authors must keep fixtures certifiable