Quickstart
From installation to the first approved rule, in six steps. Each step says who does it and how you know it is done.
A rollout starts with one area of the business that changes often and hurts when it breaks: refunds, pricing, payouts, eligibility, risk limits. Starting narrow gives owners a small number of good questions and gives you a measurable result quickly.
Before you begin
You need:
- A place to run AppThentic: your own cloud account or data centre, or AppThentic cloud. See Deployment.
- Someone who can grant read access to the repositories, ticket projects, docs spaces and channels for your starting area.
- An admin who sets AppThentic up for your company and, with the area’s engineering lead and business head, names the owners of that area.
Step 1: Pick the starting area
Choose one area and list the repositories, ticket projects, docs spaces and channels where its rules are built and discussed.
Who: your admin, with the area’s engineering lead and business head.
Done when: you have one area, its sources, and the two or three people who decide how it works.
Step 2: Set up AppThentic
On AppThentic cloud, your admin signs in and there is nothing to install. In your own infrastructure, install AppThentic, activate your license, and choose where om, AppThentic’s model, runs. See Deployment.
Who: your admin on AppThentic cloud; an engineer on your platform or infrastructure team for your own infrastructure.
Done when: your admin can sign in.
Step 3: Connect sources and add members
Connect the sources for your starting area only. AppThentic reads what you connect and nothing else. Add your members and set each one’s projects, role and scope. See Reading your systems and Access and audit trail.
Who: your admin, with whoever administers each source.
Done when: every source for the area shows as connected and reading has started.
Step 4: Review the first map
This is the first thing AppThentic gives you, before anyone is asked a question. It lists the business rules it found, where each one lives, what is already written about it, and who most likely owns it.
| Rule | Where it lives | Status | Likely owner | Already written |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer refund window is 30 days | refunds/policy.py:42 | Observed | Finance · R. Mehta | 2 pull requests, 1 ticket |
| B2B refund window is 60 days | refunds/policy.py:42 | Documented | Finance · R. Mehta | Wiki: Refund policy |
| Festive orders get extended returns | ops/festive.py:18 | Inferred | Ops | Nothing |
| Large refunds need a manager's approval | approvals/rules.ts:77 | Observed | Unknown | 1 Slack thread |
14 rules found · 11 with a likely owner · 3 with no owner yet
Check that the list is the right shape: nothing important missing, nothing trivial included. Remove what does not matter and point AppThentic at anything it missed. Every rule starts as Observed, Documented or Inferred. See Rule statuses.
Who: the engineering lead for the area.
Done when: the list matches how the area really works, and every rule has a likely owner or is marked Unknown.
Step 5: Let AppThentic ask
Owners receive a few short questions at a time about the rules they decided. Answers are stored with the owner’s name and the date. Where the person asked did not decide, AppThentic follows their answer to whoever did. See Asking the right questions.
Who: the owners on the map.
Done when: each owner has answered their first questions.
Step 6: Approve and use
Owners approve the recorded reason. From then on, anyone can ask why the rule exists before changing it, and AppThentic watches for changes that make the answer stale. See Asking AppThentic.
Who: owners approve; everyone with access can ask.
Done when: someone about to change a rule in the area gets its reason, owner and dependants before the change ships.
What done looks like for the first area
- Every important rule has an owner.
- Most rules have an approved reason; the rest are visibly Unknown, not silently missing.
- Changes to those rules show their reason and dependants before they ship. See Change impact.
- Coverage for the area is visible, so you know what is understood and what is not. See Coverage.
Then expand
Add the next area once owners in the first one are answering steadily. Each new area reuses what AppThentic already knows about shared services and owners, so later areas need fewer questions.