Principles

Draugr is a security orchestration engine, but the hard part of security at most teams isn't running scanners — it's making their output usable by the people who have to act on it. Draugr is built around two values, and when a design choice is in tension, these are how it's resolved.

1. Great UX#

Security tooling earns its keep only if people actually run it and read what it says. Draugr treats the developer experience as a feature, not an afterthought.

• Zero-config start, sensible defaults. draugr scan . scans the current repo with no descriptor — Draugr picks a reasonable set of controls and gets out of your way. You add a Saga when you want to describe more of your app, not to get started. See the Quickstart.
• Describe what, not how. The Saga is declarative: you describe your app's surface and which controls must pass; Draugr figures out which scanners to run, in what order, with caching and parallelism. You don't wire tools together by hand.
• One tool, one mental model. The same descriptor and the same verdict drive a local run, a GitHub Action, a GitLab pipeline, an Azure template, and a PR diff. What you see locally is what CI enforces — and a platform's own dashboards get the format they read, rather than the one Draugr would rather emit.

2. Human-readable by default#

Draugr's output is meant to be read by a person first. The readable, colorized presentation is the default; machine-readable formats are always available, but you opt into them — never the other way around.

• Readable and colorized out of the box. The scan summary leads with a verdict, priority counts, and a ranked table of what to fix first (with a header and a column naming both the control and the scanner behind each finding). Logs render the same way — HH:MM:SS LEVEL message key=value — so diagnostics are legible at a glance. Color appears only on an interactive terminal and honors NO_COLOR; piped or redirected output stays plain text.
• Machine formats are the opt-in. Structured output is one flag away — --format json / --format sarif for reports, --log-format json for logs — for CI and observability pipelines. Draugr never makes a person read JSON just to see what happened.

3. A low learning curve for people new to security#

You should not need to already be a security expert to get value from Draugr. Every choice that lowers the barrier for a newcomer — without dumbing things down for a professional — is worth making.

• Recognized industry terms, not invented jargon. Controls use the names practitioners already know (sca, sast, secrets, dast, …) so the tool is easy to learn and respected by security professionals. Draugr's Norse names are flavor, never something you must learn to use it — see Naming & control taxonomy.
• Plain-language definitions. The security glossary defines every category in plain language, so the whole team shares the vocabulary — no prior security background assumed.
• It tells you what to fix first. Findings are ranked into P1–P4 from exposure, criticality, and severity, so a newcomer isn't handed an undifferentiated wall of results and left to guess what matters.
• Gentle on-ramps. draugr init scaffolds a starter Saga, and the surveyors can discover your app's surface and write one for you — so the first useful scan is minutes away, not a research project.
• Actionable evidence. Each finding carries where it is, how serious it is, and which scanner reported it, so "what do I do about this" has an answer without deep tooling knowledge.

What this means in practice#

These aren't only user-facing promises; they constrain how Draugr is built. A new control or flag should have a sensible default and read clearly in the console before it grows knobs. New output is readable first — a machine format is added as an explicit option, not the default. A new term gets a plain-language glossary entry. Output that a newcomer can't act on is a bug, not a detail. When two designs are otherwise equal, the one that a person new to security can pick up faster wins.