The Art of the Post-Mortem
Saturday, July 26th, 2008I’ve mentioned in the past that the failure of complex systems is an inevitable fact of nature. The corresponding act of human inquisition into the reasons for that failure are equally inevitable. Where I work — and almost every other large installation I’ve seen or been part of — the learnings from these inquisitions are shared for educational reasons. The name for this differs from company to company: some call it a RFO (reason for outage) or an After-Action Report, but for whatever reasons the name for this at AOL is a Post-Mortem.