We engineers love the happy paths. Our product leaders obsess over them. We design for them, we are energized by them, and we feel a clever sense of accomplishment when we build them. But the unhappy paths, the failures and edge cases, still matter. We tend to give them less thought and attention, because we expect that they happen less frequently (hopefully we’re right).

Denis Bolkovskis

Anthropic

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A technique for building more reliable software by treating unhappy paths as first class use cases.

A simple technique for more reliable software

1. Identify the top 1-2 most critical parts of your service

3. For each failure case, reason through a fix