e2e-red-triage — for the reds the preflight could not have predicted

Terms are as in e2e-environment-preflight: a row is one acceptance check in the test plan, a red is a row that failed or gave no answer, a journey is one end-to-end scenario made of rows, the suite is all the rows of a journey, and preflight is the set of environment checks that must be green before the first row runs.

Never auto-triggered, and normally never needed. One caller — the agent running the suite — and one moment:

The e2e-environment-preflight checks were all green, and a row went red anyway — or produced a null, an empty, a zero, or a silence nobody can yet explain.

If preflight was not green, the suite should not have started. If a red is an ordinary product failure with a clear cause, fix it and move on; this is not the ceremony for an ordinary bug. This is the residual after the gate has done its work — a small fraction, and one that shrinks every time move 3 is honoured.

Why this needs its own protocol

The preflight handles the failures somebody could enumerate in advance. What is left is the class where the failure produced nothing rather than an error, and the nothing appeared far from its cause. One null can mean five different things across five runs of the same suite; "no results" can mean the query matched nothing or the search never ran.

The hours such a red costs are spent attributing an absence — arguing about what a missing thing meant, from evidence that never contained the answer. Guessing feels faster than instrumenting and is not: a wrong guess costs a full suite run to disprove, and a plausible wrong guess is worse than an implausible one because it stops the search.

The deeper version, and the one worth carrying: the failure is usually a two-part outcome collapsed into one verdict. An HTTP 202 "accepted" means the request was queued, not that the work was done, and both caller and monitor read it as success until someone looks. A cleanly stopped service records an exit code that looks like a crash. In each case the evidence was there, in plain words, and nobody split it.

So the first question is never "why did it fail" — it is "what are the two halves of this result, and which half am I looking at?"

The three moves, in order

These are defaults; a project may choose otherwise and record it in its local binding.

1. Do not guess. Enter diagnosis.

Stop proposing causes. Write down first the two things this result could be a collapse of: succeeded versus reached, stopped versus crashed, empty versus unreadable, absent versus never-asked, zero-matches versus source-missing.

2. The first change makes the absence name itself. Not the product.

The first commit after this kind of red does not touch product behaviour. It changes whatever produced the empty so that it says why it is empty — in the artifact, as a field, not in a log line, which is read only by someone who already suspects the answer.

result: null
→  result: {value: null, because: "<the reason, as a code>"}

Then re-run. Only now diagnose. This inverts the usual instinct and that is the point: instrumenting first looks slower for one iteration and is faster from the second onward, because every future occurrence of this absence becomes a single read instead of an investigation.

Two shapes to watch for here, because both report health while broken:

• A check that passes when its input source is missing. A count over a path that does not exist returns zero — the same zero a real path with no matches returns. Before any "it is absent" claim, prove the place you looked at is real, then look.
• A condition that can no longer fire. An alarm testing an absolute count rather than a delta switches itself off permanently the first time the count moves.

Feed every new check a known-wrong input and watch it go red. Instruments fail toward "healthy".

3. The exit condition: come back with a durable check.

A diagnosis is not the end. The finding becomes a new preflight check for that system and a line in that system's primer (see e2e-environment-preflight), or this red is not closed.

Invoke e2e-environment-preflight to write it, and record the red in the red scoreboard described in e2e-environment-preflight, with its bucket and the new check's id:

{"row":"<row-id>","bucket":"environment","note":"…","owed_check":"<check-id>"}

This is the only mechanism that makes the residual shrink. Without it the same class of absence is rediscovered every campaign and the gate never gets stronger — the process runs, everyone is diligent, and the hours are spent again. Hitting the wall is allowed; coming back with nothing durable is not.

Classify before you close

Every red gets exactly one bucket — source, environment, stuck, harness. Be honest about stuck: a run that produced no verdict at all is not a pass and not a skip, and burying it is how a campaign reports coverage it never had.

The counts are the point. A journey whose reds are mostly source found bugs. One whose reds are mostly environment or stuck measured its own setup, and the fix for that is upstream in the preflight — never another round here.