SCALE¶
SCALE is a machine-readable framework for telling the platform story: how engineering best practices are Standardized, Consumed, Automated, Leveraged, and made Effective across an organization.
SCALE is an aggregation and narrative layer over detailed maturity metrics (such as those assessed by PRISM) — not another metrics catalog. Maturity frameworks make it cheap to generate hundreds of metrics, and cheap metrics destroy the story. SCALE's purpose is to make hundreds of metrics readable as five aspect-level storylines, each backed by drill-down evidence.
The Five Aspects¶
Every metric is tagged with exactly one aspect. These are frozen; changing them is a breaking change.
| Letter | Aspect | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| S | Standards | Do executable engineering standards exist? |
| C | Consumption | Are teams using them (adoption) and using them correctly (conformance)? |
| A | Automation | How much is enforced automatically? |
| L | Leverage | What reuse and engineering capacity do they create? |
| E | Effectiveness | Did engineering and business outcomes improve? |
Why platform teams should do this¶
Platform investment is invisible precisely because it succeeds — nothing breaks, nothing ships late, and at budget time there is no story. The SCALE report turns adoption / conformance / automation evidence into the narrative leadership actually reads: what moved, why it moved, what it unlocks next.
Where to go next¶
- Quick Start — render your first story report in a few minutes.
- The Five Aspects — the conceptual core of the framework.
- Information Model — Framework → Domain → Capability → Metric, narratives, and rollup semantics.
- Catalog Authoring — write domains, metrics, maturity ladders, and external models.
- Reference — the Framework, Domain, and Assessment file formats.
Relationship to PRISM and external frameworks¶
- Capabilities are canonical; frameworks are projections. A metric maps to external frameworks (DORA, NIST CSF, OWASP, …) without belonging to them — evidence is collected once and interpreted many times.
- PRISM assesses; SCALE narrates. The dependency arrow points one way: PRISM (and any other assessment platform) consumes SCALE, keeping the spec implementation-neutral.
Status
v0.x — the information model is expected to evolve alongside its first consumers (PRISM reporting, api-style-spec evidence pipelines, observability profiles).