The job marked complete when a step silently failed
Your customer is told the work is finished. Part of it never happened, and the system that told them is genuinely convinced.
How it actually happens
A workflow has four steps. The third one fails in a way that does not raise, it just returns nothing and moves on. The fourth step, the one that would have reported a problem, is never reached in a failing state. The orchestrator sees the chain end without an exception and marks the whole job done.
Why nothing catches it
Because completion is being inferred from the absence of an error rather than from evidence that the work was actually done. Those are different things, and almost every automation platform conflates them.
What it costs
The customer finds out instead of you. That is the expensive version of every problem on this site.
How we test for it
We build scenarios where a middle step is made to fail quietly on purpose. The correct outcome is written down first: the job must not report success. Then we check what your workflow actually reported.
Find out whether this one applies to you
The fit check is free and written. Four short answers, no call, no files, no credentials. A person reads it and tells you straight whether this is worth checking in your setup.
Request a fit check or call (832) 966-3895
The other patterns
The retry that billed the customer twice · The update that landed on the near twin · The stale update that reversed a correct state · The discount typed as 100 instead of 10
All scenarios and amounts on this page are fictional teaching examples, not customer incidents.