Editorial draft available to read. Factual and language review is pending. Examples are illustrative.
Decision and method
Define each operation's states, ordering, priority, dependencies and owner. Preserve arrival time, intended change and attempt count. Separate pending, running, blocked and completed work. Queue size alone is insufficient for management: the age and importance of accumulated work also determine whether the business process is becoming unacceptably delayed.
Illustrative example
Illustrative example: creating a company must precede its associated order. The order waits for that dependency even if its priority is high. An unrelated update can proceed meanwhile. If company creation fails, the dashboard shows the shared blocker instead of portraying twenty dependent orders as twenty unrelated integration problems.
Acceptance check
Test a sudden workload, a slow operation, a failed dependency and a worker restart. Verify that concurrent recovery does not execute the same task twice. Accept when aging work is detected, priorities cannot abandon it indefinitely and a visible procedure exists to unblock, retry or cancel an operation with a recorded reason.
Key takeaways
- A queue needs understandable states and dependencies as well as processing capacity.