01 / INTENT
Intent drives the assurance problem.
The first question is not which test should exist, but what must be true for the intended product outcome to be supportable.
ISENFORGE RESEARCH // WORKING PROPOSAL V0.1
Intent-Driven
Quality Assurance.
IDQA is a methodological research proposal for making the path from software intent to quality assurance explicit: derive what must be guaranteed, determine what evidence is appropriate, observe the system, and bound the conclusions to what the evidence can actually support.
THE RESEARCH PROBLEM
Software can be locally correct and globally wrong. A requirement can have an assertion, a test can pass, and an implementation can behave as coded while the available evidence still fails to establish that the higher-level product intent was realized.
INTENT
↓
GUARANTEES
↓
EVIDENCE REQUIREMENTS
↓
EVIDENCE STRATEGIES
↓
OBSERVATIONS
↓
EVIDENCE
↓
ASSURANCE
WORKING PROPOSITIONS
Tests remain important. They stop being the conceptual center.
02 / EVIDENCE
Evidence must fit the guarantee.
A deterministic assertion, temporal trace, visual observation, source analysis or human judgment may each be appropriate for different claims.
03 / COMPOSITION
Green parts do not automatically prove a green whole.
Evidence supporting child/component properties does not automatically establish a parent journey or composed product guarantee.
04 / DURABILITY
Scenarios and executions may be materializations.
IDQA investigates whether intent, guarantees and evidence requirements can remain durable while scenarios, automation and executions are generated, reused or discarded according to need.
RESEARCH STATUS
A proposal under evaluation, not a finished doctrine.
IDQA is being evaluated through literature mapping, explicit research questions, competing explanations, controlled benchmark cases and a reference implementation. Claims of generality, effectiveness and artifact durability remain hypotheses until the experiments support them.
HOW TO CITE THIS WORKING RECORD
WORKING CITATION / DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23032992
Costa, Rodrigo Candido. “Intent-Driven Quality Assurance (IDQA): Working Specification and Research Agenda.” Version 0.1. IsenForge Research, 28 September 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23032992. https://isenforge.com/idqa/specification/v0.1/
Zenodo archive: Version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23032992 · All-versions DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23032991.
License: Methodology text and working specification are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. Commercial use requires separate permission from the rights holder.
Versioning: this citation points to a dated working specification. A DOI, ORCID linkage and formal preprint will be added as the research publication pipeline advances.