The Five Aspects¶
SCALE organizes every metric under one of five aspects, so the platform story can be told in five sentences — each backed by drill-down evidence. Every metric is tagged with exactly one aspect.
The aspects are frozen
The five aspects are part of the specification. Adding, removing, or redefining an aspect is a breaking change to the framework.
| Letter | Aspect | Question it answers | Example metrics |
|---|---|---|---|
| S | standards |
Do executable engineering standards exist? | Rule coverage, schema completeness |
| C | consumption |
Are teams using them, and using them correctly? | SDK adoption, conformance pass rate |
| A | automation |
How much is enforced automatically? | CI gate coverage, auto-remediation |
| L | leverage |
What reuse and engineering capacity do they create? | Generated SDKs, template reuse |
| E | effectiveness |
Did engineering and business outcomes improve? | MTTR, breaking changes, incidents |
Consumption has two sub-kinds¶
Consumption is the only aspect with sub-kinds, because adoption and conformance are different facts that tell different stories:
adoption— "the SDK is installed."conformance— "the telemetry actually passes the profile."
A domain can have high adoption and low conformance (widely installed, poorly
configured) — a signal you would lose if the two collapsed into one number.
Metrics tagged consumption therefore must set consumptionKind.
Two orthogonal story axes¶
SCALE tells two stories at once:
- SCALE aspects tell the horizontal platform story across domains: "Standardization is improving everywhere."
- Domain dimensions tell each discipline's own journey. Stage order is slice order — the arc is the order. For Security: Design & Planning → Development → CI/CD Pipeline → Offensive Validation → Operations.
The aspects give leadership a fixed vocabulary; the dimensions give each team its own spine. See the information model for how these fit together with capabilities, metrics, and narratives.