Lineage & governance
Lineage traversed backwards: what breaks if I change this? The question every engineer asks before touching anything, and the one most platforms cannot answer.
Lineage answers "where did this come from". Impact analysis answers "what breaks if I change it". Same graph, opposite direction — and the reverse question is the one people actually ask before doing anything. Sometimes called reverse lineage, downstream analysis or dependency analysis. The naming varies; the move does not. Start at a node, walk the edges forward instead of back, and collect everything that would be affected.
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