Definition
The candidate control lifecycle is the path every control in Jigsaw travels, carried by the Candidate Controls board. Its five stages:
- Proposed — a clarified uncertainty with a direction and an owner. Costs nothing; commits to finding out more.
- In development and testing — being tried in real practice and tested for fitness for purpose.
- Current — promoted into service, with the fitness answers and the monitoring and review frequencies recorded, and the promotion date stamped.
- Retired — a control that served and was stood down, with the reason recorded.
- Rejected — a candidate that testing ruled out, with the reason recorded.
Retired and rejected pieces move to the Archive: set aside from the active jigsaw, never erased. A candidate also records where it came from — the review, flag, or incident that surfaced it — so a control’s whole ancestry stays traceable.
Why This Matters
The lifecycle is how controls earn their place. Each stage boundary is a decision the team makes, and each decision leaves a record — the proposal, the test results, the promotion commitments, and the reason for every ending. That record is where defensibility comes from: the organization can show, for any control, why it exists, how it was tested, and what schedule it runs on.