Incremental Build Correctness
Did the build system actually rebuild everything this change touched? Incremental builds and remote caches save hours, and silently shipping a stale artifact is the price when the dependency graph they trust is wrong. This sensor compares what the change should have invalidated against what the build did invalidate.
Sensor properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Oracle strength | Medium — divergence between declared and actual rebuild sets is meaningful but noisy |
| Independence | High — measures the build system, which the change author does not control |
| Scope | Codebase |
| Feedback latency | Minutes |
| Actionability | Guiding — points at the under-declared dependency edge |
| Type | Retrospective |
What it cannot detect
Changes whose semantic effect exceeds their declared dependencies in ways no graph captures (a shared constant edited in a header the graph treats as irrelevant). That class of surprise is what API compatibility and integration tests exist for.