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Turning unhelpful error states into signals for improvement
"Every unhandled error is a missed opportunity — to debug, to learn, to build trust."
At Treeify, we believe quality doesn't begin and end with test passes. It also lives in how failures behave — and how testable they are. We don't aim for perfection; we aim for resilience. That means creating systems where even error states are visible, meaningful, and easy to improve.
In Part 1, we explored why error culture matters. In this piece, we'll go deeper into how testers can advocate for better failure handling — starting with recoverability and observability.
🔁 Think in Terms of Recovery, Not Just Prevention
Too often, teams focus on why a system failed — but forget to ask how recoverable that failure was. In fact, one of the most overlooked metrics in modern QA is Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
In Treeify's internal projects and customer implementations, we've seen this repeatedly: ✅ Teams with graceful failure paths recover faster and ship more confidently.
Recovery-focused testing isn't just about surfacing defects — it's about accelerating response. Here's how we break it down:
- Can a user continue from where they left off?
- Can support teams trace the failure quickly?
- Can logs, messages, or UI prompts guide resolution?
If the answer is "yes," your system is operable — even under stress.
🧪 Improving Test Coverage of Error States
At Treeify, we encourage users to treat failure paths as first-class test cases. We've built our test logic maps to visualize both "happy paths" and error branches, and we encourage our community to do the same.
Here's what we recommend for better test coverage:
✅ Include negative scenarios
Don't stop at success conditions. Cover inputs that fail validation, services that time out, and states where external APIs fail.
✅ Separate messaging fixes from defect fixes
If fixing the root cause will take time, ship a better message first. A user-friendly error message often does more good in the short term than a long-term backend refactor.
✅ Create trigger conditions for known failures
You can build controlled "error triggers" into test environments to validate recovery flows. We've seen teams use dummy user types (e.g., ErrorTriggerUser) to simulate real-world breakdowns safely.
✅ Log and rate error message quality
Treeify encourages teams to not just track error frequency — but also message clarity. Create shared guidelines for what a "good" error message includes, and review them regularly.
💾 Build Recoverability Into the Product
Resilience doesn't always mean fewer bugs. Sometimes it means users can bounce back faster when bugs happen. Here are practices we've seen work:
- Form field persistence: Allow browsers to auto-fill or cache content for retry after timeouts.
- Session IDs or persistent tokens: Let users resume actions even across devices.
- Checkpointing in flows: Make sure shopping carts, onboarding steps, or configuration wizards don't lose progress during network blips.
These might seem like UX features — but they're also testability enablers.
🎯 The Role of Testers in Error Culture
As a tester, you don't always control how errors are coded — but you can influence:
- How clearly they're reported
- How they're prioritized
- How users experience them
At Treeify, our philosophy is simple: "If an error wasn't testable, it wasn't truly handled."
That's why we built Treeify to highlight missing branches and ambiguous outcomes — so teams can find failure early, and fix it with clarity.
🌱 Small Fixes, Big Impact
Here are 3 lightweight changes you can make today:
- Add a "graceful failure" column to your test case templates → Ask: What does this look like when it breaks?
- During bug triage, label misleading or vague errors separately → Treat them as UX or communication bugs, not just backend issues.
- Propose logs or user messages as quick wins in sprint reviews → Often, messaging fixes don't need architectural work — but make a huge difference.
🔜 Coming Next: Fixing Error Culture from the Ground Up
In the final part of this series, we'll explore:
- How to foster an error-aware engineering culture
- How to evaluate and improve messaging infrastructure
- How Treeify helps teams model, visualize, and test for failure proactively
🧩 Want to Map Your System's Failure Points?
Treeify lets you go beyond checklists and assertions. Our AI-assisted flow mapping turns requirements into decision paths — including the ones where things go wrong. You can visualize risks, recoverability, and what-if scenarios all in one place.
Explore early access at treeify.ai.
💬 Let me know your testing focus areas in the comments. ❤️ Follow Treeify to stay ahead with cutting-edge testing insights — let's explore the future of software testing together.