qa-resilience

# QA Resilience (Jan 2026) - Failure Mode Testing & Production Hardening This skill provides execution-ready patterns for building resilient, fault-tolerant systems that handle failures gracefully, and for validating those behaviors with tests. Core sources are curated in `data/sources.json`. ## Common Requests Use this skill when a user requests: - Circuit breaker implementation - Retry strategies and exponential backoff - Bulkhead pattern for resource isolation - Backpressure, load shedding, and overload protection - Timeout policies for external dependencies - Graceful degradation and fallback mechanisms - Health check design (liveness vs readiness) - Error handling best practices - Chaos engineering setup - Game days / DR / failover testing (with guardrails) - Production hardening strategies - Fault injection testing **When NOT to use this skill:** - Simple CRUD apps with no external dependencies — use basic error handling - Single database, no network calls — standard connection pooling sufficient - Pure batch jobs with manual retry — scheduled job frameworks handle this - Frontend-only validation — see [software-frontend](../software-frontend/SKILL.md) instead ## Quick Start (Default Workflow) If key context is missing, ask for: critical user journeys, dependency inventory (including third parties), SLO/SLI targets, current timeout/retry/circuit-breaker settings, idempotency/dedup strategy, and where fault injection is allowed (local/staging/prod). 1. Define s...