Traditional Postmortems

Traditional Postmortems are a structured process used in software development and IT operations to analyze incidents, failures, or outages after they occur. They involve gathering data, identifying root causes, and documenting lessons learned to prevent recurrence. This methodology focuses on blame-free analysis to improve system reliability and team processes.

Also known as: Post-mortems, Incident Postmortems, Postmortem Analysis, Blame-Free Reviews, Retrospective Analysis

Why learn Traditional Postmortems?

Developers should use Traditional Postmortems when responding to major incidents like production outages, security breaches, or critical bugs to understand what went wrong and implement fixes. It is essential for fostering a culture of continuous improvement, reducing downtime, and enhancing team collaboration by learning from failures without assigning blame.

Learning Resources

• docs: Google's Site Reliability Engineering: Postmortem Culture
• tutorial: Atlassian Guide to Incident Postmortems
• article: Postmortem Action Items: How to Turn Incidents into Insights
• book: Blameless Postmortems by John Allspaw