Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success - Softcover

Zwieback, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1491906413 ISBN 13: 9781491906415

Publisher: O′Reilly, 2015

Synopsis

Failure is inevitable and a postmortem analysis, conducted in an open, blameless way, is the best way for IT techs and managers to learn from outages and near-misses. But when the "root cause" is determined to be "human error" (or worse, particular humans), the real causes and conditions are lost.

In this insightful book, IT veteran Dave Zwieback shows you an approach for making postmortems blameless, so you can focus instead on addressing areas of fragility within systems and organizations. If you’re involved with assessing why something goes wrong on a project or at your company—as a system administrator, developer, team manager, or executive—the concrete steps in this guide will help you find a real solution that works.

• Recognize and mitigate the effects of stress during outages
• Learn how to communicate effectively in a charged, high-stakes postmortem conversation
• Collect the necessary data before the postmortem begins
• Focus on determining the actual causes and conditions of an outage
• Learn techniques for writing up a postmortem for either internal or external use

About this title

About the Author

Dave Zwieback has been managing large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure and teams for 17 years. He is the VP of Engineering at Next Big Sound. He was previously the Head of Infrastructure at Knewton, managed UNIX Engineering at D.E. Shaw & Co. and enterprise monitoring tools at Morgan Stanley, and also ran an infrastructure architecture consultancy for seven years.

Edition details

• Publisher: O′Reilly
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1491906413
• ISBN 13: 9781491906415
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92