OBJECTIVE: Examine whether a fictional service can recover from lost confirmation without confusing delivery attempts with separate requests. Work on paper or in an authorized isolated test environment. Do not interrupt live networks, submit real appointments or reuse production identifiers.
1. Define the Test Contract
Create an invented archive appointment request with an operation reference, a requested date and a receipt. For this exercise, repeat delivery of the same reference and unchanged details should locate the existing request, not create another appointment.
Define a separate reference as a new request. State that a repeated reference with changed details enters a conflict review state. These are explicit test assumptions, not rules to apply indiscriminately to real services.
2. Lose Only the Confirmation
Record the original request as accepted. Then suppress its confirmation in the test model while retaining the acceptance event. Have the fictional sender repeat the same request because the result is unknown to them.
Check that the response identifies the existing request and that both delivery attempts remain explainable. Verify the appointment count as well as the case count: one case with two appointments still fails the intended outcome.
3. Add Two Contrasting Cases
Submit similar details under a fresh reference and verify that the model does not silently merge the new request. Then repeat the original reference with a different date and verify that the defined conflict path is used.
Give the conflict an owner and a next checkpoint. A vague error message without a recovery route may encourage further retries and deepen the confusion.
4. Reconcile the Visible Record
Compare receipts, case history, appointments and outbound notices. Preserve the original acceptance time where the test contract requires it. Explain any linked records without falsely saying that a delivery never occurred.
Completion criterion: unchanged retries do not duplicate the intended effect, new requests remain distinct, and changed details receive explicit handling. A second reviewer should reconstruct the sequence from the retained evidence.
Read A Retry Is Not Necessarily a New Request and the fictional Second Receipt for context.