16.1 Purpose of Exception Handling Rules

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Exception handling rules help the team respond to errors consistently across Nodes, scripts, containers, generated Artifacts, Configuration, DDS communication, and validation workflows. A developer, tester, reviewer, or demonstration operator should be able to understand what failed, where it failed, why it mattered, and what the system did next.

Exception handling should support the following goals:

1. Detect errors close to their source.
2. Report errors with enough context to support diagnosis.
3. Avoid exposing secrets or sensitive local values.
4. Distinguish recoverable errors from non-recoverable errors.
5. Preserve logs and Evidence.
6. Publish appropriate Control Plane status where possible.
7. Return meaningful exit codes where a process or script exits.
8. Avoid silently swallowing exceptions.
9. Avoid uncontrolled retry loops.
10. Keep failure behavior consistent with the Node Lifecycle model.

Exception handling should not make Phase 0 appear more complete than it is. If a Node, script, generated Artifact, DDS participant, container, or validation step fails, the implementation should clearly report the failure.