Archive for the ‘Contract’ Category
Don’t get stuck
Having a standalone consumer application get stuck or crash, requiring reboot, is not the worst thing that can happen. (Worse is incorrect behavior that causes data loss or physical harm.) But requiring a reboot is the most annoying failure in non-safety-critical systems.
If there’s any good news, it’s that the list of fault modes is short:
- System resources exhausted
- Mistakenly idling
- Waiting for acknowledgement that never comes
- Deadlock
Did I miss any?
Only exception-safe code can avoid these undesired end states.
Design by Contract (DbC) is one way to exception safety.
Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) helps you plan a path to get there.
