Renew assignment leases without extending a completed job
A late heartbeat runs after completion and changes the row back into an apparently active assignment.
- Focused work estimate
- 2h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- Medium
- Engineering practice
- Guarded updates · Lease semantics
Estimated field mix
- Database engineering60%
- Distributed systems40%
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.
- ACLAIM-101 · Define assignment states and their required database fields
- ACLAIM-102 · Order eligible jobs with a stable tie break
- ACLAIM-103 · Scope work assignment queries to the operator's organization
- ACLAIM-104 · Claim one pending job atomically under competing pollers
- ACLAIM-105 · Issue a monotonically increasing assignment generation on every reclaim
Acceptance criteria
- Renew only the current assigned generation.
- Never modify terminal completion fields.
- Bound extension duration using the server's clock.
Implementation constraints
- Use one guarded update rather than read-then-write status changes.
Verification to include
- Renew a valid active assignment.
- Complete first, then send a delayed renewal and preserve terminal state.
Deliverables
- Lease renewal command and stale-heartbeat test
Rollout and recovery
Canary renewal with short synthetic leases; pause renewal on unexpected transition conflicts.
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.