This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Abdul Osman
“A polished report may fool the assessor, but the car on the road will always tell the truth.” 🚗🗣️
Everyone knows the ritual. Management asks for a status. Teams scramble. Templates are populated, slide decks multiplied 📊, "evidence" appears like magic the week before the assessment. The dashboard goes green ✅. The smiles come out. And somewhere down the line, a customer discovers a problem the slides never mentioned. 😟
That pattern matters because ASPICE is meant to be a flashlight 🔦, not stage lighting 🎭. If the light only ever hits a polished prop, you confuse performance with safety. This episode is about the difference between paperwork that comforts management and work products that protect customers.
🧾 Evidence: The Misunderstood Villain 😈
Say "evidence" and people picture folders no one reads. That's the misconception: evidence is not bureaucratic decoration. It's the trail engineering naturally leaves behind when work is real. 🛤️
Requirements, bug reports 🐛, design notes, test logs, code reviews, change requests: these are not "for ASPICE". They are the by-products of building something. ASPICE simply asks you to make them visible, consistent, and connected so anyone can follow the story from need to proof. 📖➡️✅
Evidence doesn't live in binders, it lives in the work. 💻 (Gemini generated image)
⛓️ Work Products: The Chain That Proves You Built It 🔗
A concrete example beats a thousand slides. A credible chain looks like this:
Here's the requirement 📋 (origin: customer need). Here's the review where we debated options 💬. Here's the design decision we made 🎨. Here's the configuration we built ⚙️. Here's the test that exercises that behavior 🧪. Here's the verification report that closes the loop ✅.
Each step explains why the next exists. That cause → effect chain is what turns an artifact into evidence. If any link is missing, or only assembled two days before the assessor arrives, the story collapses. 📉
Real evidence connects decisions to tests: a simple story anyone can follow. 🧭 (Gemini generated image)
🎬 Show, Don’t Tell: How Assessments Actually Work 🤫➡️🎥
Assessors don’t want rehearsed speeches; they want the laptop-open moment 💻:
- Pull up the requirement.
- Show the email or ticket where it came from 📧.
- Show the design note where trade-offs were recorded.
- Pull the test log that proves the behavior.
- Show the verification note that closes the loop.
If your engineers can do that in ten minutes, you’ve got practice. If they stumble and read from slides, you’ve got theater. 🎭
A good liaison — one person who knows the project and the mapping between work products and the ASPICE requirements — transforms the assessment from an interrogation into a demonstration. Not to game the assessor, but to let truth be visible. 👁️
Image prompt: an assessor looking at a laptop while a calm liaison points to linked artifacts.
Caption: A good liaison guides the assessor to the evidence — not to the script. 🗺️
🧴 The Snake-Oil Playbook (and Why It’s Dangerous) ☠️
Where pressure meets fear, shortcuts appear. Common tricks:
- “Write-and-file” processes nobody follows. 📁
- Tests that were never run but have fabricated logs. 🤥
- Findings marked “resolved” with the promise “we’ll do it later.” ➡️⏳
- Shopping for an assessor who prefers comfortable narratives. 🛒
These are not clever hacks; they are deferred failures. Fake green dashboards keep management happy, until the customer discovers they were never the point. 😠
The real cost of fake evidence is not an audit finding. It’s a catastrophic field failure that reads like a mystery to everyone who trusted the slides. ‼️
Quick fixes look appealing - until the product shows otherwise. 💔 (Gemini generated image)
🛠️ Practical Moves: Make Evidence a Side Effect of Doing Good Work ♻️
If you want real evidence that survives scrutiny, do these simple things:
- Build evidence into the flow: link tickets, commits, test runs, and reports automatically. 🔗
- Use your tools for tracing (version control, test runners) rather than ad-hoc Excel dumps. 🛠️
- Teach the why: explain why each artifact exists so people produce it for the right reason. 🧠
- Appoint one calm liaison who knows both the project and assessment logic. 👤
- Insist on blamelessness. Honesty only surfaces when people aren’t punished for truth. 🛡️
- Augment with AI, not replace with it. Use AI to assist in finding inconsistencies, surfacing missing links, or pre-sorting evidence. But don’t let it become a substitute for human judgment — the road tests reality, not algorithms. 🤖➡️🧠
These aren’t bureaucratic burdens. They are pragmatic habits (with or without AI) that turn assessments into improvements, not theater. 🎭➡️📈
🔑 Takeaway: The Road Won’t Lie 🛣️✅
Polish your slides if you like. But remember: a dashboard that looks good and a product that fails are not mutually exclusive — regrettably, they often travel together. ASPICE becomes useful only when evidence reflects reality, not when reality is edited to fit a story. ✍️
If you want ASPICE to protect customers, make evidence a natural output of engineering — not a last-minute prop. Show, don’t tell. The car will tell the truth; make sure what it tells is backed by substance. 💪
🔖 If you found this perspective helpful, follow me for more insights on software quality, testing strategies, and ASPICE in practice.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Abdul Osman
Abdul Osman | Sciencx (2025-09-21T10:37:18+00:00) 🏁ASPICE Literacy: Episode 5 — From Paper to Practice: Evidence, Work Products, and the Art of “Show, Don’t Tell” 📂➡️🛠️. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/21/%f0%9f%8f%81aspice-literacy-episode-5-from-paper-to-practice-evidence-work-products-and-the-art-of-show-dont-tell-%f0%9f%93%82%e2%9e%a1%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%9b%a0/
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