What’s the Point of Blameless Postmortems?
<p>Do you remember Bob Ross?</p>
<p>Bob Ross was (and still is) an icon to many Americans. He hosted a program on PBS called <em>The Joy of Painting</em> in which he would paint a new painting every episode, usually of a serene landscape.</p>
<p>Ross was known (at least on TV) for being soft-spoken and had a mentality to his painting that has lived on as his legacy. To him, you didn’t make mistakes; you made “happy little accidents.”</p>
<p>Our team at <a href="https://www.policygenius.com/careers/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Policygenius</a> has tried to adopt this phrase in our engineering culture around incidents and outages. We want to see everything as an accident — no one did anything intentionally, and no single person is to blame.</p>
<p>This idea is often referred to within the software industry as having a blameless culture. Instead of searching for some individual or team to blame for an outage, the idea is that the outage is likely due to a series of failures rather than one responsible party.</p>
<p>This characteristic often comes up during the writing and review of a postmortem document. How your team goes about reviewing an incident and the next steps after says a lot about how your team accomplishes work.</p>
<p>Let’s dive into how to build a team that hosts blameless postmortems and how it helps them succeed.</p>
<h1>What Exactly is Postmortem?</h1>
<p>A postmortem in software is the examination of an incident to understand the underlying cause of the incident. The hope is that by identifying an incident’s cause(s) after one occurs, we can learn something to help us avoid the next.</p>
<p><a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/whats-the-point-of-blameless-postmortems-5d8c2ff519d7">Website</a></p>