Record design decisions: Which practice best fulfills that goal?
Contemporaneous documentation of design decisions, architecture, and risk trade-offs is what lets a build-phase record both demonstrate compliance and trace risks.
The question
A team has finished architecting a high-risk AI recruitment-screening system and is now writing the code and configuring the model. The governance lead wants the design-and-build documentation to serve two purposes: establishing compliance and managing risk. Which practice best fulfills that goal?
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- Rely on the release-stage model card alone, since it summarizes the finished system for deployers and covers the transparency information they realistically need.A model card is a release-stage transparency artifact; it does not capture the design-and-build reasoning and risk trade-offs needed to establish compliance during development.
- Defer written documentation until post-market monitoring surfaces incidents, then reconstruct the design rationale and record the remediation steps that were taken.Reconstructing rationale after incidents loses fidelity and cannot demonstrate that compliance and risk controls governed the build as it happened.
- Record design decisions, architecture choices, and risk trade-offs contemporaneously as the system is built, so both compliance and traceability are supported. ✓Documenting design and build decisions as they are made creates a traceable, contemporaneous record that both demonstrates compliance and lets risks be linked back to specific choices.
- Capture only the training dataset statistics in detail, since data quality is the dominant driver of both compliance obligations and residual risk in the system.Data statistics are one input; alone they omit architecture, model selection, and risk decisions that the design-and-build documentation must cover.
The trap
Treating the release-stage model card as sufficient documentation of the design-and-build process. How to remember it
Contemporaneous documentation of design decisions, architecture, and risk trade-offs is what lets a build-phase record both demonstrate compliance and trace risks.
How many of these would you get right?
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