Manual-Only Governance

Kind: anti-pattern

Layer: Enforcement Core

Aliases: Document-Only Policy

Record: architecture:manual-only-governance

Severity: discouraged

Scope: correctness_verification, security_governance

Formed by: Encode architecture rules in documents, meetings, or reviewer memory without executable checks, metrics, or automated enforcement.

Canonical: Ontology

A defect in which architecture rules or security policies exist only in documents or in reviewers' memory, with no executable check, so they drift from what the system does.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Boundary Leakage and before Opaque Runtime Behavior.

Contracts

• Quality Governance Loop

Refactored by

• Fitness Functions
• Static Analysis
• Policy as Code
• Architecture Test
• Track Rule Metrics

Severity

• discouraged

Category

• Anti-patterns

Force

• Correctness verification
• Security governance

Violates

• Policy Enforcement

Linked from

• Who does what
• The stance
• Where a rule lives
• A system is a graph
• Seven controls, seven classes
• Anti-patterns
• Architecture Review / Evolution / Governance Artifacts
• Security / Privacy / Compliance / Governance
• Architecture Review Evolution Governance
• Quality engine
• Failure shapes
• Severity levels
• The forces