XTC: Effective Incident Analysis

Topic: Effective Incident Analysis by Andy Parker (https://twitter.com/aparker42)

You’ve probably heard about “blameless post-mortems”. If you’ve tried to do it, you’ll likely have found that keeping an analysis blameless is harder than it sounds. Tensions and emotions after an incident can run high, and we can easily fall into traps that allow blame to infect the analysis. If we can avoid those traps, an incident can be a great opportunity for learning.

Keeping blame out of incident analysis is more than just learning a few techniques. It takes a philosophy of incidents that allows blamelessness to even exist. We’ll discuss both the philosophy and practice analysis techniques with that philosophy in mind.

Bring the details of your most recent outage, incident, or failure and we’ll practice:

• Telling a story of the incident
• Analysing the story to learn how it differs from expectations
• Examining the story and those differences to identify causes
• Evaluating causes to identify possible improvements
• Whittling down the improvements to the ones that would really matter

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About XTC

The eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) is London's oldest agile meetup, and has been meeting since 1999. Initially the meetup was focused on discussing Extreme Programming (XP), but it has expanded to include anything XP, agile, lean, or the larger context in which we do software development activities.

We welcome all software development newbies, practitioners, and experts to discuss topics of interest over drinks.

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