
Guidance on Performing Retrospectives - lfittl
http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/12/26/guidance-on-performing-retrospectives/
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gregdoesit
It's likely just a wording thing, but what is talked as a retrospective here,
we call a blameless postmortem at my current company. And we have an ever
evolving template we use to share the timeline, root cause, learnings & action
items.

The one thing I would add to the article is spend time to calculate the
business impact of the incident and start the retrospective with this. This is
something that might not be that straightforward for engineers to know and
might need help from other people within the company to understand. How many
customers were impacted and in what way? E.g. if you had an outage on your web
site where people could not check out, how many orders did you lose and what
was the total value? The answer will depend if people completed their order
after the outage was over, if they could use e.g. the mobile app that time and
so on. Pinpointing the business impact can help understand just how severe
that specific outage was (and how that part of the system is connected with
everything else).

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craigkerstiens
Author here: We explicitly moved away from postmortem at Heroku and follow the
same at Citus Data because postmortem has references essentially to something
having died. The blameless part of a postmortem helps, but blaming something
is separate from the idea of examining something that has been killed. There
is a ton of value in emphasizing the blameless part though, so very noted.

The business impact is something that is important, and we often do measure. I
often aimed to separate two somewhat as leading with that can create some
unintended consequence of aiming to point blame/etc.

~~~
SomeHacker44
That is a very literal interpretation of post"mortem" to which I don't
subscribe in this context. The Oxford Shorter English dictionary I have on
this iPad also includes this definition: "An analysis or discussion conducted
after the conclusion of a game, examination, or other event." (I won't get
involved in a discussion of what a dictionary is or what its purpose is,
sorry.)

I also like and use the term postmortem to mean what this author calls
retrospectives, and use the term retrospective to mean a more general look
back without being event-based.

