Blameless Postmortem

Putting together a blameless postmortem culture is one of the most effective way to improve quality in an engineering organization.

One of the best manager I had once told us that the only sure way not to have an outage is not to deploy to production and I surely expect you to ship and deploy a lot of features. The only thing I care about once we have an outage is to put a postmortem and learn from it.

A good outline for a postmortem outage report:

Executive Summary
Timeline
Impact
Root Cause Analysis
Detection
Mitigation
Prevention
Next Steps

Writing a good report, sharing it broadly and following up on next steps will unlock a culture of continuous improvement in your organization.

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Software Engineering from the Frontlines Course on Maven

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