Striving for zero-errors doesn’t make sense

When Optimising For Robustness Fails

Optimising for robustness will inevitably lead to an overinvestment in pre-production risk management, and an underinvestment in production risk management. Symptoms of underinvestment include:

  • Stagnant requirements – “non-functional” requirements are deprioritised for weeks or months at a time
  • Snowflake infrastructure – environments are manually created and maintained in an unreproducible state
  • Inadequate telemetry – logs and metrics are scarce, anomaly detection and alerting are manual, and user analytics lack insights
  • Fragile architecture – services are coupled, service instances are stateful, failures are uncontained, and load vulnerabilities exist
  • Insufficient training – operators are not given the necessary coaching, education, or guidance

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