Adjacent fields

From the documentation of the field

Five established fields sit near this one. Each paragraph below states the relationship and stops. No ranking is implied.

Decision quality

Decision quality is a framework from the decision-analysis tradition, set out by Carl Spetzler and co-authors, which names six requirements for a good decision: an appropriate frame, creative alternatives, relevant and reliable information, clear values and trade-offs, sound reasoning, and commitment to action. It judges a decision at the time it is made, separately from how it turns out. This field asks a different question: what a decision structure must possess for failure to be avoided, and it proves necessity inside Class C. A decision-quality process can be a mechanism for one or more of the six capabilities where it performs the function, in the sense of methodologies.

ISO 31000 and COSO ERM

ISO 31000:2018 gives principles, a framework and a process for managing risk in an organisation of any kind, as guidelines and not as requirements for certification. COSO's Enterprise Risk Management: Integrating with Strategy and Performance (2017) sets out five components and twenty principles. Both describe how an organisation should manage risk. They do not contain necessity proofs. This field addresses a structural precondition and can be read alongside them, since a risk-management framework can supply mechanisms for several of the six capabilities where it performs the function.

Assurance engagements

An assurance engagement is one in which a practitioner gives a conclusion about a subject matter against stated criteria. The international standard on assurance engagements other than audits or reviews of historical financial information is ISAE 3000 (Revised). It distinguishes reasonable from limited assurance, and attestation from direct engagements. This field uses "assurance" in its generic sense of verifying, as the field definition explains, and its verdict has the same general form: a conclusion about a structure against published criteria. It does not adopt ISAE 3000 or its levels. Whether a particular assessment is carried out under such a standard is a matter for the assessor.

Safety and assurance cases

A safety case is a structured argument, supported by evidence, that a system is acceptably safe for a specific application in a specific operating environment. Assurance cases generalise the idea to other properties. This field supplies one kind of evidence that could appear in such an argument: machine-verified statements about the necessity of structural capabilities in decision structures. The argument itself, and the question of whether a system is safe in context, belong to the assurance case. The field's verdict concerns decision structures and says nothing about physical safety.

Industrial formal methods

Formal methods use mathematical specification and proof in engineering. The seL4 microkernel has a proof that its implementation matches its specification. CompCert is a verified optimising compiler for almost all of C90. Amazon Web Services has used the TLA+ specification language, with model checking, on critical systems since 2011. This field is itself a formal-methods result, proved in Lean 4 over Mathlib. The difference is the object. Those efforts verify that a piece of software meets a specification, while the machine-verified content here is the necessity of structural capabilities in decision structures. Applying it to a real organisation is an assessment, not a proof about code.