Order eligible jobs with a stable tie break
Jobs created at the same instant appear in a different order on each poll, making starvation difficult to reproduce.
- Focused work estimate
- 1h 15m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- Medium
- Engineering practice
- SQL ordering · Queue semantics
Estimated field mix
- Database engineering80%
- Backend20%
Field percentages are editorial estimates of the ticket's engineering focus. They total 100%; they are not measured time, proficiency scores, or ownership evidence.
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Project context
A fictional inspection service assigns review jobs to staff. Polling clients sometimes claim the same job and a disconnected client can finish work after reassignment.
Setup prerequisites
- Create synthetic jobs and two independent database clients.
- Use explicit state methods and an injected clock.
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
Acceptance criteria
- Order by declared priority, ready time and opaque job ID.
- Exclude future and terminal jobs explicitly.
- Bound claim candidate count.
Implementation constraints
- Document whether priority changes preserve or reset waiting time.
Verification to include
- Create equal-time jobs and observe stable order.
- Include future and completed jobs and verify they are ineligible.
Deliverables
- Eligibility query and ordering fixtures
Rollout and recovery
Introduce the query in read-only inspection first; restore previous routing on semantic mismatch.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice database concurrency, leases and transactional invariants.
For the team: Review whether assignment authority remains reliable during contention and recovery.
Evidence boundaries
Outcome Evidence: Tests, patches, and runbooks are requested deliverables. They become Outcome Evidence only through a qualified Mission and immutable Evidence IDs.
Ownership Evidence: Independent adaptation must be observed under a declared verification policy and cite immutable Evidence IDs. Completing a planning ticket establishes no Ownership Evidence.