Identify poison jobs without starving unrelated work
One malformed document repeatedly consumes the first worker slot.
- Focused work estimate
- 3h + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Retries · Queue design
Estimated field mix
- Platform engineering60%
- Site reliability40%
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 document service has a rising processing backlog. Operators cannot tell whether arrivals, worker failures, or a slow dependency is responsible.
Setup prerequisites
- Create a bounded local queue simulation with synthetic jobs and controllable worker/dependency failures.
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
Acceptance criteria
- Bound attempts by failure category.
- Move exhausted jobs to an inspectable terminal holding state.
- Allow unrelated valid jobs to continue.
Implementation constraints
- Keep payload contents out of generic incident logs.
Verification to include
- Quarantine a deterministic poison job.
- Process a valid neighboring job and preserve its identity.
Deliverables
- Poison-job containment.
Rollout and recovery
Enable per job type; retain held work for reviewed correction.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice incident timelines, queue diagnosis, and measured recovery.
For the team: Produce a repeatable response that preserves work integrity and exposes customer delay.
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.