Canon Overview
3 min read
Canon is where you upload the documents that describe how your product should work, so Hawzu’s AI uses them when it writes test cases and answers questions.
What Canon Does
Section titled “What Canon Does”Without Canon, the AI writes test cases from general AI knowledge about how apps like yours usually behave. With Canon, it writes them from your own specs.
For example, your security spec says sessions expire after 15 minutes. With that spec in Canon, a generated test case checks for 15 minutes, not a guess, and it carries a source tag such as Security baseline · §3.2. You can open that section and check it in seconds.
This is called grounding: the AI bases what it writes on your documents. The source tag is a citation: it shows which document, and which section, a piece of output came from.
Get Started
Section titled “Get Started”-
Open a project and select Canon in the left navigation.
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Select Add document, then Upload a document, and pick your spec. See Add documents to Canon.
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Wait for the document’s Status to change to Grounding. This means the AI can use it. The page updates by itself, so there’s no need to refresh.
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Generate test cases with the AI Test Case Generator, or ask Oracle a question about your spec.
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Check the source tags on the output. Each one names the document and section it came from.
Where Canon Is Used
Section titled “Where Canon Is Used”You don’t read documents in Canon. Other features read from it.
| Feature | What Canon does there |
|---|---|
| AI Test Case Generator | Used in both stages: the coverage map and the written test cases. Each draft shows source tags for the documents it used. |
| Release readiness | The AI summary checks the release against the exit criteria in your documents and cites them. |
| Atlas | Discover and Find gaps read Canon to suggest areas for your product map. |
| Oracle | Answers questions like “what does our spec say about expired cards?” from your Canon documents, and lists the documents it used. |
Words You’ll See
Section titled “Words You’ll See”| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Grounding | The AI bases what it writes on your documents. As a document status, Grounding means the document is ready and the AI is using it. |
| Citation | A source tag on AI output showing which document (and section) it came from. Also called a citation chip. |
| Passage | A short section of a document. Canon splits each document into passages so it can search them. |
| Scope | Which projects a document applies to. Documents you upload apply to the current project. |
The Canon Page
Section titled “The Canon Page”Three tiles sit above the document list:
| Tile | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Documents | How many documents are in Canon. If any could not be read, the tile says how many. |
| Passages indexed | How many passages Canon can search. If you have documents but this is 0, they haven’t finished processing. |
| Grounding now | How many documents the AI can use right now. This is the number to watch. |
A document that is still processing, or that failed, is listed but not used. Only Grounding now tells you what the AI will actually read.
Canon and Files
Section titled “Canon and Files”Canon documents are managed only on the Canon page. They don’t appear in File Manager, and you can’t add a File Manager file to Canon. Upload it to Canon instead.
Put a document in Canon when it says how the product should behave. Keep everything else, such as screenshots, evidence and notes, in Files. See Canon best practices.
Documents you upload on a project’s Canon page apply to that project only. Hawzu also supports workspace documents that apply to every project, but they can’t be added from the app yet. See Scope and permissions.