Attesting Manual Verification

Use this skill when a quality practice can only be verified by a person, and the record of that verification needs to be worth something later.

Some practices have no signal. No tool can prove a human explored the product, that a business owner accepted the feature, that a screen reader user could complete the flow, or that a reviewer understood the change. Two bad things happen as a result: the practice gets dropped from the contract because it cannot be automated, or a tool-shaped proxy gets reported as a pass - branch protection counted as "code review done".

An attestation is the honest third option: a dated, attributed statement that a named human verified something, with the evidence attached. It is weaker than a machine check and stronger than an assumption, and it must never be presented as either.

When to Use

• a contract contains manual-attestation practices: code review, exploratory testing, UAT, manual accessibility, UX review, observability readiness, groundedness review
• a gap matrix shows a human practice and the honest state is neither PRESENT nor MISSING
• release sign-off evidence lives in chat threads and closed tickets
• an audit or handover asks who verified what, against which build
• a team wants credit for real manual work that no tool can see

Operating Principles

• An attestation names a person, not a process. "Reviewed by @maria on 2026-08-19" is an attestation. "We do code review" is a policy.
• It is scoped to a build or a change range. An attestation with no scope drifts forward forever and quietly covers work nobody looked at.
• Evidence, or it is an opinion. Session notes, a charter, a recording, a defect list, a screenshot set, a sign-off message. A link is fine; nothing is not.
• Never derive an attestation from tooling. Branch protection requiring one approval is evidence of a process, not of a specific change being understood. Deriving one is the failure mode this practice exists to prevent.
• Absence is a state, not a failure. "Unattested" is reportable and honest. It is not the same as "not done", and it is not a blocker unless the contract says so.
• Findings from an attested practice cap below blocking. Unattested high-risk work is worth a nudge, not a red build - a gate that blocks on an unprovable property gets switched off, and then nothing is recorded at all.
• Attest before merge, not after release. An attestation collected at sign-off time is a memory exercise.
• An expired attestation is unattested. A UAT sign-off from three releases ago does not cover this build.

Workflow

Phase 1: Identify what needs attesting

From the quality contract, list every practice whose verification type is manual-attestation. Typically: code-review, exploratory-testing, manual-accessibility, uat, ux-review, observability-readiness, groundedness-review.

For each, establish three things before anybody signs anything:

• What counts as done - the exit criterion from the contract, in words a verifier can act on
• Who can attest - a role, then a name. A tester attests exploratory testing; a business owner attests UAT; the developer who wrote the change cannot attest their own review
• What scope one attestation covers - a release, a feature, a change range, a specific flow

Phase 2: Do the work, then record it

The attestation is the record, never the work. Run the actual practice with its own skill - planning-exploratory-testing, auditing-accessibility, code-review-advanced, verifying-acceptance-criteria - then record the outcome.

Use ./resources/attestation-register.md. Every entry carries:

limitations is the field that makes an attestation trustworthy. "Explored checkout on Chrome desktop only; no mobile, no Safari, no guest flow" tells a release manager exactly how much weight the record carries. Without it, every attestation reads as total coverage.

Phase 3: Record it where it survives

Two mechanisms, and they compose:

A register file - .qa/attestations.md, next to the contract. Best for release-scoped practices: UAT, exploratory sessions, accessibility passes, observability reviews.

A commit trailer - Comprehension-Attested-by: <name> for change-scoped attestation of understanding, read from git log. Best for per-change records, because it travels with the change. Grammar in commit-trailers.instructions.md.

Do not use a PR comment as the record: squash-merge discards it and reviews get deleted.

Phase 4: Report the state

In the gap matrix, a manual-attestation practice has three honest states:

Never PRESENT, never PASSED. Those words imply a machine verdict this practice cannot produce.

Report alongside: who attested, against what scope, the stated limitations, and - for release decisions - which contracted human practices have no record at all. That last list is usually the most useful sentence in a go/no-go pack.

Common Failure Modes

• Deriving attestation from tooling. Branch protection reported as code review done; a merged PR reported as reviewed. The most common and most misleading error.
• Team-alias attestation. "@qa-team verified" means nobody did.
• Unscoped records. An attestation with no build or range silently covers everything that came after.
• No limitations field. Turns a partial check into an implied full one.
• Attesting at sign-off. Reconstructing a week later produces a record of what people remember, not what happened.
• Self-attestation on review. The author cannot attest their own change was reviewed.
• Blocking on unattested work. Makes the practice a bureaucratic obstacle, and the register empties out within a month.
• A register nobody reads. Attestations need a consumer - the release pack or the gap matrix - or they become filing for its own sake.

Resource Map

• ./resources/attestation-register.md - the register format, worked entries per practice, expiry and staleness rules, and how attestations feed a release pack

Related Skills

• deriving-a-quality-contract - where practices are marked manual-attestation and their exit criteria are set
• planning-exploratory-testing - do the exploratory work; this skill records it
• auditing-accessibility - do the accessibility pass; this skill records it
• verifying-acceptance-criteria - the evidence a UAT attestation points at
• code-review-advanced - the review whose outcome gets attested
• assessing-comprehension-debt - uses per-change attestation as one of its inputs
• assessing-release-readiness - consumes the register as release evidence
• governing-quality-waivers - when a human practice will not happen at all, that is a waiver, not an absent attestation

Definition of Done

This skill is complete when:

• every manual-attestation practice in the contract has a stated exit criterion, an eligible attester role, and a scope unit
• each record names a person, a scope, a date, evidence, an outcome, limitations, and an expiry
• no attestation has been derived from tooling or from the existence of a process
• the gap matrix reports ATTESTED / UNATTESTED / STALE, never PRESENT or PASSED
• unattested contracted practices are listed explicitly for the release decision
• findings from unattested work are capped below blocking, and that ceiling is stated