jargon

Data engineering·Quality, tests and knowing it is wrong

the failed check stops the pipeline so the bad numbers never reach the dashboard, and someone gets paged instead.

Blocking data test

Also callederror severity test, circuit breaker test

A data test whose failure halts publication rather than merely recording a warning. Choosing which tests block is the whole design: block on everything and the pipeline stops nightly, block on nothing and the tests are decoration. The useful rule is that a test blocks when serving wrong data is worse than serving stale data, which is a question for the consumer.

Commonly confused with