After Action Review vs Blameless Post Mortems

Developers should use AARs after major project milestones, sprints, or deployments to systematically capture insights and prevent recurring issues meets developers should learn and use blameless post mortems to effectively handle incidents in production systems, as they help identify systemic issues, improve team collaboration, and reduce the likelihood of similar failures. Here's our take.

After Action Review

Nice Pick

Developers should use AARs after major project milestones, sprints, or deployments to systematically capture insights and prevent recurring issues

Pros

• It helps teams improve processes, enhance collaboration, and build a culture of transparency and accountability
• Related to: agile-retrospectives, post-mortem-analysis

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Blameless Post Mortems

Developers should learn and use Blameless Post Mortems to effectively handle incidents in production systems, as they help identify systemic issues, improve team collaboration, and reduce the likelihood of similar failures

Pros

• This is particularly valuable in high-stakes environments like cloud services, e-commerce, or financial applications where downtime can have significant impacts
• Related to: site-reliability-engineering, devops-culture

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

Use After Action Review if: You want it helps teams improve processes, enhance collaboration, and build a culture of transparency and accountability and can live with specific tradeoffs depend on your use case.

Use Blameless Post Mortems if: You prioritize this is particularly valuable in high-stakes environments like cloud services, e-commerce, or financial applications where downtime can have significant impacts over what After Action Review offers.

The Bottom Line

After Action Review wins

Developers should use AARs after major project milestones, sprints, or deployments to systematically capture insights and prevent recurring issues