What a green gate means

Read the claim before the colour

A green result is useful only when you can explain its scope. Qualification means that the declared required checks passed against current evidence for the named scope and expectations. It does not mean that every dataset, security context, report state or future refresh is correct. Read the claim first, then use the state as a concise description of that claim.

The eight boundaries introduced earlier are places to inspect evidence. They are not eight synonyms for success. Source, meaning, Bronze, Silver, Gold, semantic, report and release can have different evidence coverage. An evidence-bound entry at an existing asset must retain the limits of its upstream claim. A report-level result cannot silently qualify a source boundary that was outside the selected proof.

Use state words precisely

Qualified describes required checks supported by the selected current evidence. Unknown means qualification has not been established. Stale means the evidence no longer matches an observed dependency. Blocked describes a required step that cannot currently establish its result because a prerequisite or observation is missing. Not-applicable needs a declared scope reason; it is not a convenient substitute for a check that would fail.

State	Review habit
Qualified	Read the declared checks and their evidence before repeating the claim
Blocked	Name the missing prerequisite or observation
Stale	Identify the changed binding and the dependent evidence
Unknown	Keep the absence of an established qualification visible
Not-applicable	Explain why the requirement is outside this scope
Failed	Preserve the disagreement and investigate the actual result

These descriptions are a reading guide. Preserve exact result vocabulary from the selected runtime output when recording a real review. Do not rewrite a failure as “pending” to make a handover look more reassuring, and do not infer a supported status from a badge on a screenshot.

Follow freshness and supersession

Receipts bind declared inputs, outputs and upstream evidence. Observed changes can invalidate those dependencies and make downstream evidence stale. The right response is to inspect the changed binding and obtain the required fresh observations. The local ledger does not continuously poll every remote dependency, so a retained pass is not an always-on monitoring service.

The newest failed retry supersedes an older success. That rule prevents a reviewer from choosing a convenient historical green receipt after the current run exposed a problem. History remains useful for investigation, but the older result does not establish the current state. State which result you selected, why it is current and what would need to be repeated after a change.

Recognise a successful negative test

An intentionally failing gate can occur inside a successful regression exercise. The test succeeds because it observes the expected refusal. The inner qualification still fails. In the Sales offline exercise, missing execution evidence causes required scenarios to fail with reasons. That is evidence that the gate rejects unsupported claims, not evidence of a live qualified pipeline.

This distinction also applies to signatures. A trusted signature authenticates exact content. It does not convert a failed gate into a passing comparison or establish that a person accepted the business meaning. Hosted can acknowledge a truthful signed projection while local comparison and human acceptance remain separate questions.

Completion check

Annotate a synthetic result containing one current comparison, one changed dependency and one unobserved report state. Explain which claim can be repeated, which evidence is stale and which qualification remains unknown. Add a negative-test result and distinguish the outer test outcome from the inner gate outcome. Your review should let a reader identify a concrete next observation without assuming universal correctness.