AoAD2 Practice: Incident Analysis

This is an excerpt from The Art of Agile Development, Second Edition. Visit the Second Edition home page for additional excerpts and more!

This excerpt is copyright 2007, 2021 by James Shore and Shane Warden. Although you are welcome to share this link, do not distribute or republish the content without James Shore’s express written permission.

Incident Analysis

Audience
Whole Team

We learn from failure.

Despite your best efforts, your software will sometimes fail to work as it should. Some failures will be minor, such as a typo on a web page. Others will be more significant, such as code that corrupts customer data, or an outage that prevents customer access.

Some failures are called bugs or defects; others are called incidents. The distinction isn’t particularly important. Either way, once the dust has settled and things are running smoothly again, you need to figure out what happened and how you can improve. This is incident analysis.

The details of how to respond during an incident are out of the scope of this book. For an excellent and practical guide to incident response, see Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems [Beyer2016], particularly Chapters 12–14.

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In this Section

  1. Incident Analysis
    1. Key Idea: Embrace Failure
    2. The Nature of Failure
      1. Sidebar: A Typo? Really?
    3. Conducting the Analysis
      1. 1. Set the stage
      2. 2. Gather data
      3. 3. Generate insights
      4. 4. Decide what to do
        1. Sidebar: Preventing Failure
      5. 5. Close the retrospective
    4. Organizational Learning
    5. Incident Accountability
    6. Questions
    7. Prerequisites
    8. Indicators
    9. Alternatives and Experiments
    10. Further Reading

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