Reading your systems
Which sources AppThentic reads, what it looks for in each, and what it leaves alone.
Business rules live in more places than code. A discount cap is set in billing, explained in a Slack thread, argued about in a Jira ticket and half-described on a wiki page. AppThentic reads all of them, so a rule’s evidence comes together in one place.
Sources
| Source | What AppThentic takes from it |
|---|---|
| Repositories | The conditions that encode decisions on money, time, people and state, and where each one lives |
| Pull requests and commits | The reasoning engineers already wrote down, and who reviewed and approved each change |
| Tests | What the business expects the rule to do, including its edge cases |
| Tickets (Jira) | The request that started the rule, and the discussion around it |
| Docs and wikis | The rule as the business described it, and whether that description still matches the system |
| Team threads (Slack) | The argument that led to a decision, and who settled it |
What happens on a read
- Find rules. AppThentic looks for conditions on amounts, windows, roles, regions and statuses, and for values that also appear in conversation. See Business rules.
- Group locations. The same rule in three services and a help page becomes one rule with several locations.
- Collect evidence. Everything already written about the rule is attached to it, with links back to the original.
- Propose an owner. From authorship, review and the people named around the rule. See Finding the owner.
- Decide what to ask. Only what is still missing. If a PR already explains the reason, AppThentic asks the owner to confirm it, not to write it again.
What AppThentic does not do
- It does not write to your systems. Reading is read-only.
- It does not read sources you have not connected.
- It does not widen access. A person sees a rule’s evidence only if they could already see its source.
Keeping up with change
After the first read, AppThentic follows new commits, merged pull requests and updated tickets. A change to a rule’s code or config marks its answer Stale. See Keeping answers current.