Painters Tape and Fault Tolerance

(Authorized by Nicholas C. Zakas, excerpted from his Top of the Month press release, please subscribe!)

One of my favorite things is painter tape (also known as masking tape). This seems like a silly thing: you stick the tape to the wall when you paint it to avoid paint staining the wall. This tape is not sticky so it can be ripped off the wall without damaging it. The reason I love painter tape is the idea behind it: the painting is messy, and instead of trying to avoid getting dirty, it’s better to get dirty first and then clean it up easily. Even the best and most gifted painters can splash paint in some places, distract, or otherwise end up causing the paint to run where it shouldn't be. Mask the places where the paint may splash with paint and tear off the tape to create a nice, clean, complete area which is much faster, easier and less frustrating. What does this have to do with software engineering?

Painter tape is all about a concept called fault tolerance. You don't expect everything to go smoothly, you expect to make mistakes. When you expect to make mistakes, the decision you make is not to avoid all mistakes, but to be able to easily recover when errors occur. Did the paint run to a place that shouldn't be? If that place is covered with painter tape, that's OK. Forgot to apply painter tape? Now this error becomes a bigger problem. As software engineers, we can think the same way about the code we write.

To make your code fault-tolerant is to ask yourself this question: How will it fail? Not whether it will fail, but assuming it will fail, and in what ways will it fail?

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