Carragee Consulting

I like the word brittle, but I don’t think this is an antonym in the tech industry.

I asked this question on LinkedIn and Chris Jackson provided an entire taxonomy of broken processes:

• Brittle – Works fine and tightly to spec, as long as nothing changes – in which case cracks appear or it shatters.
• Fragile – Known (at least by its creators) as having several points of failure – may regularly collapse in a less than final way and be patched up again, until the next time
• Flaky – Never really worked end-to-end but with a lot of human intervention provides the image of a functioning system.
• Criminally incompetent – So bad (though sometimes in less than obvious ways) that it does real harm to those who have to use it or are measured by it.

Unfortunately I think I’ve been exposed or involved in every type of “anti” robust data system.

Measuring brittle: Image credit for plate