Software Evidence in a Minute

Software Evidence

Evidence versus assertion, provenance, verification, and evidence chains.

Central question: What does this observation legitimately support?

• Evidence vs Assertion

  The Factimonious distinction: assertions are claims; evidence is observable support for those claims.

• Provenance

  Why knowing where a fact came from—commit, log, tool, timestamp—is part of the evidence itself.

• Reproducibility

  Why another engineer should be able to re-run the check that supports your claim.

• Verification

  Checking a claim against evidence—distinct from generating the claim in the first place.

• Test Evidence

  What automated tests can support as evidence—and the common overclaims they invite.

• Dependency Evidence

  Using manifests and lockfiles as evidence of what third-party code you actually resolve.

• Evidence for AI-Generated Changes

  What counts as evidence when an agent authored the diff—and what agent prose cannot replace.

• Evidence Chains

  Link claim → observation → artifact → verification so engineering conclusions stay traceable end to end.