The requirement management tool the safety case was missing

Client & context

Inside a live safety engagement at AstaZero (RISE), the Test Robot safety case needed requirement traceability and evidence management that existing tooling could not provide — and procuring an enterprise requirements platform was neither fast nor a good fit.

The problem

Safety work dies in spreadsheets: requirements without traceability, evidence scattered across drives, and no audit trail for what changed and when. The safety argument for SAE L3-L4 test equipment demanded traceable, immutable, reviewable requirement data — and it didn't exist.

What I did

• Designed and shipped, solo and AI-assisted, a full-stack Requirement Management web app used directly in the safety process.
• Backend on Fastify 5 with PostgreSQL 16: 19 tables, append-only history, and immutability triggers so every requirement change is a permanent, auditable record.
• JWE session authentication (@auth/core + jose) and file uploads for evidence attachments.
• Vanilla-JS SPA frontend with a REST-native domain layer — zero framework overhead, fast and maintainable.
• Encoded the standard into the data model: traceability, immutability, and evidence as first-class citizens, not just CRUD screens.

The outcome

Standards & tools