Read me first

The first task for any new colleague is to read and understand our four public sites. There is no intranet. Everything we communicate internally also stands externally — including this document.

They are a scaffold. They tell you in what order to read, how much time to set aside, which page is the authority on which question, and how we check that it stuck.

They do not tell you what the pages say.

That is a deliberate choice, and it is worth understanding before you begin. An onboarding pack that reproduces the product becomes a copy that drifts from the original — and then we have two truths, one of them out of date. So nothing here needs updating when the product changes. If the product changes, the sites change. The scaffold stays standing.

That rule has a consequence for you: you cannot read your way to the answers here. You have to go to the pages.

• File — What it is for
• 00 — Read me (this one) — Purpose, time, levels
• 01 — Knowledge map — How the sites relate, and which page wins in a disagreement
• 02 — Priorities — Which pages are urgent, and what you must be able to do after each
• 03 — Programme — Ten modules of reading, exercise and requirements
• QUIZ — The question pool — public
• 04 — Quiz answer key — For whoever runs the onboarding — do not hand out

Two more documents sit alongside, and they are not scaffold:

• VÆRDIER.md — why this material is public, and the three words we do business on. Read it first if you are wondering about that. It also holds the list of what we never say, which you are examined on.
• DOKUMENTATIONSGENNEMGANG-<date>.md — a dated audit record of what a read-through of the sites found, and what was corrected. It is history, not syllabus.

The whole syllabus is 15¼ hours of dedicated time. It is a task with time set aside and an exam at the end — not something to seep in between other work.

• Level — What you can do — Syllabus — Time
• Can hold a conversation — Explain what the company does, and why we are independent — Modules 1–2 — 3 h
• Can answer a customer correctly — Answer without overstating — and know when to say "I don't know, but it's on X" — Modules 1–5 + milestone — 7 h 45 m
• Can contribute independently — Work in the product, write about it, take a customer meeting alone — The whole syllabus — 15 h 15 m
• Can onboard others — Teach — and catch a colleague over-claiming — Whole syllabus + having run a survey on your own code and read the report — 17 h 45 m

It is not the volume. It is that a large part of the material is about what we do not claim.

You can read every single page and still be dangerous to the company if you have not understood that part. A colleague who promises a little too much in a customer conversation costs us precisely what we sell. That is why the quizzes are weighted towards the limits rather than the features, and why there is an exam at the end.

Features you can learn on the job. The limits have to be in place before the first customer conversation.

The programme in ONBOARDING-03 is the full path. If you need to orient yourself quickly before that, take these in this order — they are the topics the rest rests on:

• canine.dev/ — the studio, and how the independence is arranged
• codeassuranceindex.info/ — the standard, and who owns the number
• watchdog.canine.dev/about/ — what Watchdog is, and what it is not
• assay.canine.dev/ — the other half: the people who buy software
• watchdog.canine.dev/ — the product in full
• codeassuranceindex.info/spec/ — how the number is calculated
• codeassuranceindex.info/dimensions/ — the vocabulary
• codeassuranceindex.info/verify/ — how anyone checks us
• watchdog.canine.dev/where-watchdog-fits/ — the limits against other tools
• watchdog.canine.dev/compliance/ — what we measure, and what the customer declares
• assay.canine.dev/how-it-works/ — how evidence becomes decisions
• watchdog.canine.dev/trust/ — what happens to the customer's code

Set aside four hours. After that you can hold a qualified conversation about the platform.