Governance & stakeholders

A contract is a promise, and promises need enforcement. Elva bakes governance into the contract object itself: what happens when a change would break consumers, which rules the schema must honor, and who gets a say before anything ships. No wiki page of process, no tribal knowledge — the policy travels with the contract.

Pick your breaking-change policy

The Governance step’s first decision is what Elva should do when a change to the contract — or drift from its sources — would break consumers:

The policy pairs with the audience you chose at Define: Partner Integration, Public API, and AI Agent / MCP contracts default to requiring approval before publish, while Internal Service contracts skip it for speed.

Validation rules in plain language

Below the policy sits an optional validation rules box where you describe the invariants your contract’s data must respect — in English, not in a rules DSL. Suggestion chips seed the common ones:

• IDs are UUIDs
• Emails are valid
• No empty strings
• Positive numbers only

Write your own on top (“amounts are integer cents”, “dates are ISO 8601”). These rules document the contract’s expectations right where consumers — human and AI — will meet them.

Stakeholders, with roles that mean something

Governance is people, so the last step is inviting them. Add stakeholders by email, assign each a role, and send the invite:

Stakeholders live on the contract’s overview page afterward: searchable, role-editable, removable, and countable at a glance. External emails work — your partner’s integration lead can be a stakeholder on the contract they consume.

Where to go next

Sync, drift & the changelog

See the policy in action: alerts, acknowledgments, and the version history every publish creates.

What is an API contract

Back to the concept: audiences, defaults, and everything a contract carries.