What to ask your agency about error handling

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on error handling, these questions are worth asking early.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Swallowing errors silently is how bugs survive for months. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Log enough context to reproduce without guessing. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about error handling before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Swallowing errors silently is how bugs survive for months — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.