Waiver
A recorded, owner-owned decision to accept a known risk — visible in every report, time-boxed by a review date, and never a way to make a critical blocker disappear.
Definition
A waiver is the formal record that a known finding will not be fixed now, and that a named person accepts the risk. In MC Testing a waiver records who accepted it, the reason, the accepted risk in words, and an expiry or review date. Waivers attach to the underlying defect (its signature), not to a single observation, so re-running the tests does not quietly clear them.
Waivers change how a finding is presented, not whether it exists. A waived major finding can allow a CONDITIONALLY READY label instead of blocking on that finding alone — but the waiver itself is printed in the report's 'Waivers & accepted risks' section, so a client reading the report sees exactly which risks were accepted, by whom, and until when.
How MC Testing applies it
Critical findings get no silent path at all. A critical risk can only be accepted by the owner, in writing, with an explicit acknowledgement — and even then it still counts as an open blocker in scoring: the readiness rules treat an owner-accepted critical risk as still open, so the label stays NOT READY. The waiver documents the decision; it does not launder the score.
Waivers since the previous snapshot are also counted in the report's change summary, so a release that 'improved' by waiving findings is visibly different from one that improved by fixing them. See also Readiness Score.