Judging a finding

Every finding asks you one question: was this worth telling you? Answering it takes one press, either way. Confirming may carry words if you have them; it never requires them, and dismissing never asks for anything at all.

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Dismissing takes one press

Open a finding, press Dismiss, and it is done. There is no dialog, no reason to pick from a list, and no box to fill in. That is a promise rather than an oversight. A finding you disagree with should cost you a second and no thought at all — the moment dismissing gets expensive, people stop reading findings instead of dismissing them. If you press it by mistake, Undo is there straight afterwards and puts the finding back exactly as it was. That is the trade: nothing to read before, something to press after.

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Confirming takes one press, and is saved on that press

Press Confirm and the confirmation is recorded immediately — who confirmed it, and when. A form then appears in the space the buttons were in, offering to record the evidence behind that confirmation. It asks two things: whose judgement this is — you, or someone outside the studio whose reply you’re transcribing — and their answer to the one question this product always asks at this point:

What did the Sentry issue page show you at that moment, and would you have known this in sixty seconds without this product?

That form blocks nothing. The confirmation is already saved before it renders. If you close the page, walk away, or leave it blank, the confirmation stands exactly as it did the moment you pressed the button. If you do fill it in, your answer is recorded verbatim and shown on the finding afterwards, alongside whose judgement it was. It is not editable later, for the same reason the finding itself is not: a record that can be tidied up is a record nobody can check.

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Confirming does not open an incident, and does not contact anybody

This is the one place in the product where a person is in the loop and an escalation would be one step away, so it is worth stating plainly:

• Confirming writes no incident.
• Confirming sends no message to anyone — not to you, not to your team, not to anybody on call.

A confirmation is a judgement being written down. Declaring an incident is a separate decision that a person makes deliberately, and nothing in this product makes it on your behalf.

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What happens to what you record

Your judgement is written down once and is not edited afterwards. A confirmation carries who confirmed it and when; if you answered the question, your words are stored verbatim and are shown on the finding. We read those judgements to decide whether the findings we send are worth sending. That is the whole of what they are for — nothing about a judgement is shared outside this product, and nothing about one is sent to anybody.