[crestfallen]

My memory is a bit hazy but it's a good story.

At one place, there was some important order processing taking place. As is fairly typical, couldn't rely on getting all the required info. Or critically, getting all the required info correctly. Some extra data, slightly missing pieces but enough to work, etc. etc. Some could be pretty gross. We built validation to massage some inputs, modify processing, what have you to address as many of those as we could think of. The team put in some metrics to identify which validations were "triggered" for each order. Neat. If we'd add more, we'd add a date to it.

It was great. We reported those stats so anyone could see anytime, but we'd also send out some comms about it every now and then. It also helped tremendously when a coworker or customer or whoever would say "Oh no! What happens if XYZ?" and we'd say no worries, we already addressed it, and we prevented #### orders from getting stuck for XYZ.

It showed that the team was thoughtful, that we were invested in making this work, that work needed to continue to keep things running smoothly, and we had data to back that up.

Really helped switch the conversation in the org because folks could see it. If someone pointed out that we hadn't thought of something, it honestly was more about what do we do vs. why didn't we think of this. (Yes, there is a comment here about poor org thinking or blame culture, but some of that exists everywhere.) More proactive. Recognition of preventive quality. People gave us accolades and it bubbled up to some good and real recognition at higher levels too.

I'm mangling the words here a bit but I hope you get the idea.

[strgcmc]

There is a simple but undeniable element of genius to the idea of, instrumenting the number of validations triggered. I would hazard a guess that 90+% of teams would focus on an "order success rate" type of metric and call it a day, instead of a "# of times bad data was handled" metric, which is exactly how you escape this trap of good work going unnoticed.

Thanks for sharing! Shamelessly stealing and applying this concept at work next week!

[elbear]

Yeah. Another way I would put it is to also look at inputs that strayed off the happy path. There may be something to learn from them as well, maybe something that adjusts the happy path.

[crestfallen]

That's exactly where we started. It worked or it didn't, right? The team was super curious to know, in fact, how many of the edge cases happened. That piece right there had some unexpected value as well. And it grew out from there.

I hope it helps!