Here’s a practical, plain‑English game plan to validate three big Stella Ops claims—quiet scans, provenance, and diff‑native CI—so you (and auditors/customers) can reproduce the results end‑to‑end.

---

# 1) “Explainably quiet by design”

**Goal:** Fewer false‑alarms, with every suppression justified (reachability/VEX), and every alert deduplicated and actionable.

**What to measure**

* **Noise rate:** total findings vs. actionable (has fix/KB/CWE + reachable or policy‑relevant).
* **Dedup:** identical CVE across layers/repos counted once.
* **Explainability:** % of findings with a clear path (package → symbol/function → evidence).
* **Suppression justifications:** % of suppressed items with VEX reason (not affected, configuration, environment, reachability).

**A/B test setup**

* **Repos (representative mix):** .NET (aspnet app & library), JVM (Spring), Node/TS (Nest), Python (FastAPI), Go (CLI), container base images (Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu), and a known‑noisy mono‑repo.
* **Modes:** `baseline=no VEX/reach`, `quiet=reach+VEX+dedup`.
* **Metrics capture:** emit JSONL per repo with counts and examples.

**Minimal harness (pseudo)**

```bash
# baseline
stella scan repo --out baseline.jsonl --no-reach --no-vex --no-dedup
# quiet
stella scan repo --out quiet.jsonl --reach --vex openvex.json --dedup
stella explain --in quiet.jsonl --evidence callgraph,eventpipe --why > explain.md
stella metrics compare baseline.jsonl quiet.jsonl > ab_summary.md
```

**Pass criteria (suggested)**

* ≥50% reduction in non‑actionable alerts.
* 100% of suppressions carry VEX+reason.
* ≥90% of actionable findings link to evidence (reachable symbol or policy gate).

---

# 2) “Provenance‑first DevSecOps”

**Goal:** Ship a verifiable bundle anyone can check offline: SBOM + attestations + transparency‑log proof.

**What to export**

* **SBOM:** CycloneDX 1.6 or SPDX 3.0.1.
* **Provenance attestation:** in‑toto/DSSE (builder, materials, recipe, digest).
* **Signatures:** Sigstore (cosign) or regional crypto (pluggable).
* **Transparency log receipt:** Rekor (or mirror) inclusion proof.
* **Policy snapshot:** the exact policy/lattice and feed hashes used.
* **Repro manifest:** declarative inputs so scans are replayable.

**One‑shot exporter**

```bash
stella bundle export \
  --sbom cyclonedx.json \
  --attest provenance.intoto.jsonl \
  --sig cosign.sig \
  --rekor-inclusion rekor.json \
  --policy policy.yml \
  --replay manifest.lock.json \
  --out stella-proof-bundle.tgz
```

**Independent verification (clean machine)**

```bash
stella bundle verify stella-proof-bundle.tgz \
  --check-sig --check-rekor --check-sbom --check-policy --replay
# Output should show digest matches, valid DSSE, Rekor inclusion, and replay parity.
```

**Pass criteria**

* All cryptographic checks pass offline.
* Replay produces byte‑identical findings set (or a diff limited to time‑varying feeds pinned by hash).

---

# 3) “Diff‑native CI for containers”

**Goal:** Rescan only what changed (layers/deps/policies) with equal detection parity and lower wall‑time.

**Test matrix**

* **Images:** multistage app (runtime+deps), language runtimes (dotnet, jre, node, python), and a “fat” base (ubuntu:XX).
* **Changes:** Dockerfile ENV only, add/remove package, patch app DLL/JAR/JS, policy toggle.

**Runs**

```bash
# Full scan
time stella image scan myimg:old > full_old.json
time stella image scan myimg:new > full_new.json

# Diff-aware
time stella image scan myimg:new --diff-from myimg:old --cache .stella-cache > diff_new.json

stella parity check full_new.json diff_new.json > parity.md
```

**Metrics**

* **Parity:** same actionable findings IDs (allowing dedup).
* **Speedup:** (full time) / (diff time).
* **Cache hit ratio:** reused layers/components.

**Pass criteria**

* 100% actionable parity on modified images.
* ≥3× faster on typical “small change” commits; no worse than full scan when cache misses.

---

## What you’ll publish (deliverables)

* `VALIDATION_PLAN.md` — steps above with fixed seeds (image digests, repo SHAs).
* `harness/` — scripts to run A/B and diff tests, export bundles, and verify.
* `results/YYYY‑MM/` — raw JSONL, parity reports, timing tables, and a 1‑page summary.
* `policy/` — locked policy + feed hashes used in the runs.

---

## Nice‑to‑have extras

* **Reachability/VEX gallery:** a few “before/after” call graphs and suppression cards.
* **Auditor mode:** `stella audit open stella-proof-bundle.tgz` → read‑only UI that renders SBOM, VEX, signatures, Rekor proof, and replay log.
* **CI examples:** GitLab/GitHub YAML snippets for full vs. diff jobs with caching.

If you want, I can spit out the repo‑ready scaffold (folders, stub scripts, sample policies) tailored to your .NET 10 + Docker setup so you can run this tonight.