Release It Book Club Chapter 2 Case Study

Chapter 2 of Release It! is a case study of an incident that occurred which brought down an airline’s entire check-in system. It took three hours to recover, and was caused by leaking connections from a database connection pool. Nygard’s conclusion from the case study is that perhaps this issue could have been caught with more testing, but even so it’s impossible to catch every such defect. And therefore you have to prepare your application to survive such issues. Do you see any problems with this conclusion?

At face value, I think it makes sense. However, it seems a bit bleak. If I cannot catch every defect, how am I supposed to trust that my code to survive unforeseen defects will be robust? It seems worth a try, I admit. And hopefully it will become more clear as I continue through the book.