Prioritizing Bug Fixes over New Features
A lack of a proper incident management process can result in mismanaged incidents, delays, and expenses.
To avoid exposing themselves to the risk of mismanaged incidents, unnecessary delays, and associated costs, organizations must constantly iterate on their incident management process. Incident responders should have a “jump bag” that contains all the critical information they may need to prevent delays in responding to incidents. The Incident Commander focuses on short-term actions that stabilize the system enough to move it to more acute care. In the tech field, containment actions are temporary solutions such as isolating a network, regressing a build, or restarting servers. The goal is to take small steps and keep the scope limited while ensuring that the systems are returned online.
Take advantage of the learning opportunities that on-call rotations provide.
Do you find yourself repeatedly visiting the same pages? It may be time to implement a system to make them more easily accessible. Schedule regular hands-off cycles to ensure everyone is getting a chance to learn. It may be time to reevaluate and identify any issues if you need to receive feedback from the on-call process. Consider implementing a hands-off policy on Fridays to give everyone a break. Be mindful of the pressure on-call rotations can put on individuals and prioritize blameless postmortems.
It’s all about the people on your team.
Take the time to measure team morale and encourage open communication through channels like the Poll Slack Application. Automated systems can help keep track of unique alerts and ensure a fair rotation. Remember to consider time zones when establishing on-call rotations. It may not be everyone’s favorite part of the job, but it is a learning process. Remember to consider the importance of psychological safety in creating a positive work environment.
To encourage growth and evolution of the on-call rotation, prioritize improvement in areas like alerts and monitoring.
In development teams, On-Call Guidelines are used to identify reusable patterns that can help prevent production problems. Bugs are likely to increase without such a process in place, but it’s also important to consider how this impacts development costs. Focusing on fixing bugs rather than developing new features can positively impact product sales. It’s common for developers to miss details during the development cycle, as it’s impossible to account for every edge case. However, these issues can arise once the application is in production without a process in place to capture ongoing requirements and changes the product will reduce its quality and capacity to evolve.
[¹]: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
