Most people don’t ever think what will happen to the data if background processes stopped working due to server issues!
Especially when the customers are consuming the data on regular bases.
What will the application do when the server is back up? continue working as usual? will you have to make manual changes? notify the customers?
Sometimes you must think about these scenarios carefully, in advance!
For example, we have an invoice management system that generates recurring invoices based on schedule set by the user.
Our solution
We had to carefully put together a plan to handle the situation if system went down and process failed to generate invoices during that time.
Our previous code didn’t take this into account, which let to missed invoices. Users were left wondering what to do when system came back up.
To help the Users and get things back in order we decided to create a new interface displaying all the missed invoices to the users.
So they had an option to tick the invoices an send.
Contrary to this, if they system automatically sent all the missed invoices the customer would receive everything missed in one go! this would confuse the customers!
Anyways, we decided that it was best to generate the invoices when system came back up and let the users pick whichever ones they wanted to send, in this case all the missed invoices.
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