Statusshould

Statusshould is a term used in software engineering and project management to describe a principle that the reported status of a system should align with objective measurements and observed behavior. It emphasizes truthful, data-driven status communication rather than optimistic or ambiguous updates.

Origin and reception of the term are informal and not tied to a formal standard. It has appeared in internal tooling, runbooks, and discussions about reliable reporting, but it is not widely standardized across industries. As such, statusshould is often treated as a guideline or a design principle rather than a formal protocol.

Usage and practice

Statusshould manifests in dashboards, incident responses, and release governance. In practice, it encourages statuses (for example, green, yellow, red) to reflect real conditions, such as latency, error rates, or uptime. A status change should be supported by accompanying metrics or logs. For example, if an service shows sustained high error rates and latency, the status should move to degraded rather than remaining green.

Implementation patterns

Automated checks frequently enforce statusshould. Monitoring and alerting rules feed into a status state used by runbooks and status pages. An example rule might state that if error rate exceeds a defined threshold for a set period, the system’s status must be set to degraded. Such rules can be embedded in CI pipelines, deployment gates, or incident management tools.

Criticism and considerations

The concept depends on the quality and relevance of collected metrics. Poor instrumentation or noisy data can undermine statustruth. Critics caution against over-formalization, but proponents argue that it improves transparency and decision-making.

See also

Status reporting, incident management, reliability engineering, health checks.