Software Factory Best Practices from Open-Source Projects (4/4): Turning Failures into Rules

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0900

“The lane has no rate gate, and I found no reason for that.” – OpenClaw ClawSweeper PR #1855¹

Dohyun Jung - Principal Consultant, ROBOCO

This is the final post in the four-part series “Software Factory Best Practices from Open-Source Projects.”

The series

The Criteria and 12 Repositories: what counts as a factory, and where factories are running
Who Merges? Risk-based delegation and permission structures
Factories That Filter by Evidence: proving a test “fails before the fix”
Turning Failures into Rules: self-improvement loops and their limits (this post)

The quote at the top comes from a PR filed after OpenClaw’s automatic implementation worker succeeded 52 times and failed 256 times in a single week. That PR added a mechanism that stops automatic implementation when the failure rate is high.¹ Detect a failure, find its cause, and change a rule or mechanism so it does not happen again. This is the self-improvement loop, the sixth of the criteria defined in Part 1.²

Continuous-Improvement on ROBOCO

Software Factory Best Practices from Open-Source Projects (4/4): Turning Failures into Rules

Dohyun Jung - Principal Consultant, ROBOCO