Gate: failure-handled

The declared failure has a path that handles it in the code.

Property	Value
Checker	failure-handled
Confronts	spec
Blocking by default — new project	yes
Blocking by default — existing project	no — informs

How it measures

A spec catalogues how its unit fails, with its own letter (-E) and a table of condition and result. Until these gates, nothing confronted that catalogue with the code: a declared failure crossed the whole pipeline without anyone asking whether the code handles it, whether the handling records it, or whether a handling that exists answers any declared failure at all.

Three gates close that static layer, and none depends on production or on a log format:

• failure-handled asks whether the governed code has any path that handles a failure, when the spec declares failures;
• failure-logged asks whether that handling also records the occurrence;
• failure-declared is the inverse of the first, and catches the commonest case: somebody wrote a defence and never declared what it prevents.

Handling is not “having a catch”. What a check that refuses, a recovered panic and a caught exception share is the effect, not the syntax, so the project’s dialect says what a handling and a record look like in its language. Without those patterns the gates have measured nothing and say so. The code is judged as a set: the code does not cite the failure’s code, so no rule can be tied to one specific path, and the gates assert the case that matters, a unit that declares failures with no handling at all.

A failure can leave the charge only with knowledge written beside it: @resilient: <reason> says “it happens, I know why, and the flow absorbs it”. A bare marker exempts nothing. The same rows carry the conclusions the observation layer reads: @resilient and @observing: <what was ruled out>, each with its reason read whole.

A unit whose handling matches are all normal flow (a lazy map initialisation, a pattern that did not match) closes its failure section with none — <why>, and that satisfies failure-declared.

Declaring it

gates:
  - name: failure-handled
    on: [spec]
    check: failure-handled

Source: checker · its spec