Risk & governance
Critical-error rate
The share of cases containing a failure with severe consequences.
Definition
A critical-error metric gives disproportionate weight to failures that breach law, policy, customer safety, financial correctness or access controls.
Why it matters
Average quality can look strong while a small number of unacceptable failures make a system unfit for deployment.
Related concepts
- Golden set
A curated set of representative inputs and trusted expected outcomes.
- False negative
A system misses something that is genuinely present or risky.
- Operational fitness
Whether a system works reliably within real service constraints.