---
title: "Prioritise Recoverability Over Flawless Deployment"
source: "https://virtualddd.com/heuristics/prioritise-recoverability-over-flawless-deployment/"
authors: ["Anne-Marie Charrett"]
tags: ["resilience", "software design", "quality"]
type: "design heuristics"
question: "In modern distributed systems, where should we focus our efforts: defect prevention or incident recovery?"
submitter: "Anne-Marie Charrett"
---

# Prioritise Recoverability Over Flawless Deployment

Shift focus from attempting to eliminate every bug before deployment to ensuring rapid recovery from failure in production. The cost of a quickly remediated production incident is often lower than the cost of maintaining complex, slow, and brittle pre-production environments. Invest heavily in observability, monitoring, and fast rollback capabilities.

## Example

We accept the risk of minor bugs reaching production, provided we can detect and roll back a change in under five minutes. This is more efficient than maintaining a costly and slow system integration test environment.