Continuous Compliance & Automated Evidence Harvesting

Eliminating Audit Fear Through Ambient Automation

Traditional compliance models rely on post-hoc manual documentation: QA engineers spending weeks filling out traceability spreadsheets before a release. This practice fails because documentation inevitably drifts from the underlying codebase. Continuous Compliance replaces retrospective paperwork with automated build-time gates and cryptographic attestations.

Step-by-Step Implementation Cadence

Compliance-as-Code: Open Policy Agent (OPA) Policy Gate

Express regulatory compliance rules as executable code evaluated in pull request status checks:

package pr.compliance

default allow = false

# Rule 1: Every PR must reference a verified Jira/GitHub tracking issue
has_valid_issue_link {
    regex.match("^(FIX|FEAT)-[0-9]+", input.pr.title)
}

# Rule 2: SAST scan must report zero Critical/High vulnerabilities
zero_critical_vulnerabilities {
    input.security_scan.critical_count == 0
    input.security_scan.high_count == 0
}

# Rule 3: Unit test line coverage must exceed 85%
sufficient_test_coverage {
    input.test_report.coverage_percentage >= 85.0
}

# Gate evaluation
allow {
    has_valid_issue_link
    zero_critical_vulnerabilities
    sufficient_test_coverage
}

Anti-Patterns to Eliminate