Stop retrying unsupported document formats
The trusted mock renderer returns UNSUPPORTED_FORMAT for a fixture file. The worker retries it every minute, consuming the same capacity as a temporary storage timeout.
- Focused work estimate
- 2h 30m + prerequisites
- Priority in the scenario
- High
- Engineering practice
- Retry policy · Error taxonomy · Failure budgets
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 internal document portal creates previews through a trusted mock renderer. Large batches crowd out small teams, failed documents retry forever, and operators lack a safe replay command. This exercise never executes uploaded code or real document macros.
Setup prerequisites
- Queue semantics
- Database transactions
- Operational metrics
Preceding work
Complete these dependencies, or supply their agreed outputs before taking this ticket.
Acceptance criteria
- Classify unsupported format as terminal and storage timeout as retryable.
- Apply a bounded attempt count and backoff policy to retryable failures.
- Record each attempt and the final exhaustion reason without replacing earlier failures.
Implementation constraints
- Unknown provider errors need an explicit conservative policy; do not retry forever.
Verification to include
- Retry a transient failure that succeeds on its third attempt.
- Verify unsupported format runs once and persistent timeout reaches a bounded terminal state.
Deliverables
- Failure classification table and retry policy
Rollout and recovery
Apply new classification to future attempts; stop scheduling exhausted jobs without erasing their attempt history.
Value of the work
For the engineer: Practice asynchronous lifecycle control, fair scheduling, bounded retries, and artifact recovery with a deterministic provider.
For the team: See how an engineer accounts for accepted work and reduces operational toil without granting operators broad data access.
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.