Don't prevent risk, build ability to recover
As an engineering leader, your role goes beyond just preventing mistakes; it's about creating an environment that encourages growth and rapid recovery.
What can it mean in practice? See some examples below:
- Cleanup Noise in Logs and Monitoring Systems:
- Problem: Noise in logs and monitoring systems can distract your team from real issues.
- Solution: Get rid of false positives and make sure what's alerting you in your logs are only true issues.
- Create Solutions That Catch Mistakes:
- Problem: Mistakes often go unnoticed until it's too late.
- Solution: Implement testing automation, code scanning, and robust code review processes to catch mistakes early in the development cycle.
- Build an Automatic Alerting System:
- Problem: Critical errors can slip through the cracks, causing issues for your users.
- Solution: Set up an automatic alerting system to notify your team of critical errors via SMS, email, or chat alerts.
- Setup Post-Mortem Sessions:
- Problem: Failures happen, but without analysis, they become repeated mistakes.
- Solution: Hold post-mortem sessions to review past failures, learn from them, and strategize on how to prevent them in the future.
- Introduce Rollback Strategies:
- Problem: Even with the best tech stack, issues can arise.
- Solution: Develop a rollback strategy to quickly revert problematic changes and maintain system stability.
- Introduce Rollout Strategies:
- Problem: Rushing changes to all users can lead to widespread issues.
- Solution: Gradually roll out changes to a small percentage of users, measure their impact, and incrementally increase adoption to ensure a smoother deployment.
- Cultivate a Blameless Culture:
- Problem: Blaming individuals stifles growth and innovation.
- Solution: Foster a blameless culture where the focus is on understanding what went wrong, improving processes, and preventing future issues.
