Owners and approvals
Who owns a rule, what approving means, and what happens when nobody answers.
Every rule has an owner: the person accountable for why it exists. Usually that is a business owner (Head of Finance for a refund window), not the engineer who typed the code.
How ownership is set
AppThentic proposes an owner from the evidence: who wrote, reviewed, approved or last changed the rule, and who is named in the tickets and threads around it. Answers refine it. When an engineer says “Finance decided that”, the question moves to Finance. Your team can also set owners directly for an area.
What approving means
Approving a rule means the owner confirms two things:
- AppThentic describes what the rule does correctly.
- The recorded reason is the real one, in words the owner stands behind.
Approval is recorded with the owner’s name and the date. It is never inferred from silence.
If the owner rejects the write-up, it does not become the answer. They correct it, and the corrected version is what they approve.
When the owner doesn’t answer
Unanswered questions stay Unknown and visible to the team. After a reminder, AppThentic escalates to the owner’s manager, who can answer, delegate or reassign ownership. Nothing is approved by default.
When the owner leaves
Before someone leaves, AppThentic prioritises the rules only they can explain. After they leave, their approved answers stay, with their name and date, and ownership moves to whoever takes the area. See When someone leaves.
Approvals and change
An approval belongs to a specific version of a rule. When the rule or its context changes, the approval is marked Stale, not deleted, and the owner is asked to confirm it again.